Water on our feet and a crow on our windshield

I don't even know if I should blog more than the title! Saturday (8/23/08) was quite the eventful day! We had decided earlier in the week that we wanted to take Emma to Florence, Oregon to go to the beach for the first time. We woke up bright and early and got ready and headed to get some coffee for our drive. We got coffee and realized we didnt' have an umbrella to set Emma under once we got to the beach, so we stopped at Walmart. WELL, fyi, Walmart doesn't have beach umbrella's, so I got a double canopy golf umbrella, it's HUGE! I suppose I should add that I walked through the entire Walmart looking for this umbrella, I finally had to ask someone where the umbrella's were. The Walmart here is not set up like the Walmart back home, it's confusing when you don't know where you're going! ;-)

Flash forward to the drive... Can I just say that I think one lane highways are ridiculous and that they should be required to be at least two lanes? It is IMPOSSIBLE to go the speed limit behind a pair of trailers! I did get a little queezy when we hit the passing lanes cuz they all seemed to be on curves of the highway. Not fun. We finally arrive at the beach after our hour or so drive and I have to go to the bathroom. Most of you know me and my dislike for unclean/unsanitary restrooms (I will rarely go in a gas station and you have to REALLY talk me into using a port-a-potty), well this bathroom was a toilet that had a hole that looked like it never ended. I felt like I was in the Goonies when the Fratelli's look down the storm drain and all the bats fly up, I was pretty sure something was going to fly out of their and bite my butt. It was the fastest I have ever gone to the bathroom I think. I must add for later purposes, the lady in front of me was not a small lady and neither were her two little girls, one of which informed me that her "daddy is a Mexican". I felt like telling her my daddy was hawaiian to see if she thought I'd topped her daddy, but I realized I'd be the only one who thought that was funny...

We finally get everything ready for the beach and low and behold, we have to climb a sand hill to get to the other side. Remember those heavier set people I told you about? They were ahead of us and they were barely making it up the hill. *disclaimer - Obviously this may sound like I have a thing against heavy people - let's take a look at my pre or post pregnancy self... I AM a heavy people...* And return - So I'm thinking, "great, those kids might be heavy, but they're kids and they look like they might fall over and roll back down the hill, how the heck am I gonna make it up this thing?" Nathan all the while is happily walking up the hill. I hate sand by the way. It only made walking up the hill more work. When we finally make it to the top of the hill, I'm only saddened to realize that I have the other side of the hill to walk down and that I have to again, walk this hill. *I'm totally a fat kid:-)*

THE BEACH finally! We set up camp and sat down to eat our picnic lunch and what does Emma decide to do? First of all, probably my fault for sitting her between Nathan's legs so she could sit up but not topple over... She puts her hands in the sand. CUTE!!! Oh wait, not cute cuz those hands make it to her mouth, then her face, then oh yeah, her eye region. Luckily, we caught her before she got sand IN her eyes. She was having the time of her life. She absolutely screamed when we cleaned her up. She was basking in the sand glory that it was. But she was also hungry, and I wasn't going to feed a sandy child. :-) So Emma ate and then we decided to see how she liked the water, which was FREEZING! We waded out so a wave could wash up over our little feet and oh, woops, one of those was just a little bigger than we thought and Emma and Mommy got a little wet. Emma didn't really like the water though. After the water, we decided to pack it in. We had spent a couple hours enjoying the beach and the sunshine and decided that it was time to get Emma out of the sun. So we ventured to Old Town Florence to walk around for a little bit. I finally had this famous Mo's seafood and I have to say, I wasn't as impressed with it as I expected... It's just not as good as Ivar's.

As our afternoon in Florence wound down, we began our journey home. Now I know that most people have probably only read this blog to find out about this hitting a crow thing and you're going to be quite sad because the climax is mainly this - We were driving on the highway and both Nathan and I noticed this crow on the road just staring at the car. I couldn't figure out why it hadn't flown away yet, but apparently, God had inteded for us to hit the crow with our windshield. HAHA! I just replayed the event in my head! Okay, that's mean, I'm sorry. But the crow was dumb enough to sit until the very last second and then flew across the car instead of away, it was asking to be hit. And at the moment it happened, I actually ducked in fear that it was going to fly through the windshield. It was not quite as funny as it was ten minutes later when my heart stopped pounding. Needless to say, there is either a dead crow on the side of the road or one injured one hanging out. :-)

Our adventure to the beach was quite fun! I can hardly wait to do it again! :-) There's nothing like a good old family trip! :-)