Labor Day 2012

Beverly Beach is a huge campground a bit south of Depoe Bay.  To get to the beach, one has to go under Highway 101.  Luckily, Nature provided a stream that runs out of the hills and through the beach into the ocean, which made man (in the form, probably, of the WPA) provide a bridge over the stream to carry the cars, which allows us pedestrian campers to walk under the bridge to the beach.

Nice!

We camped with Brian and Teresa and Riley and Charlie the Poodle.  Weather was awesome and Elizabeth & Riley were a great team (until maybe the last day, when they got kind of sick of each other and started bickering), and we spent more time on the sand than I maybe ever have in my life -- all day, pretty much.

It was great.

One of the best things about this trip was the breakthrough we experienced with Suzanne's relationship with Teresa. Suzanne just loved hanging with Aunt Teresa, after shunning her for a year and a half.  You've finally come to your senses, girl, because Teresa's awesome!

This was our first car camping trip where we brought a suitcase instead of my 1985-vintage external frame backpack as the primary clothes-carrier.  It worked out a lot better, in my opinion.  Suzanne liked to sit in it and get her diaper changed on it.

Brian brought a kite, and shared well with the kids. The enormously powerful Oregon coast winds tore it out of his grasp at one point, but I was able to dive atop the reel of string as it bounced across the sands.  A moment of triumph.

If they were a band, this would be the album cover.

Suzanne's reaction to seeing a centipede: priceless!

We had gone on a hike along the stream and it ended in a meadow full of daisies (and a couple of centipedes... and about a hundred mole holes.)  Elizabeth wasn't freaked out, she just looks that way in this picture.

Mom and baby in the hammock.

For most of the trip, the beach was -- miraculously! -- not windy.  On the last day, though, the wind did its usual thing: howling like mad, spitting sand in your eyes, etc.  Elizabeth and Riley sought refuge in this little dugout cave and wouldn't budge until we said we were going back to the campsite.

Between our campsite and the next was this little swamp.  Elizabeth and Riley didn't discover it until late in the weekend, but once they did it was hard to keep them out of it.  In true Larrison tradition, Elizabeth fell in the mud and got soaked.  Plus, they caught a tadpole.