I’ve been trying to start this post for the last forty-five minutes and all I have to show for it is a blank page and forty-five minutes of my life that have been spent alternately staring at a blinking cursor, checking Twitter to see if the person who’s trying to hack my account has succeeded, and watching a live feed of the Perseid Meteor shower from the Canary Islands.
Let me explain those things:
1. Blinking cursor – I’m struggling to find words
2. Twitter – I keep getting emails asking if I need to reset my password which means someone is trying to get into my account.
3. Perseid Meteor Shower – I have always been a fan of the astronomy. Sadly, it’s cloudy in the Canary Islands so all I’m seeing are clouds instead of meteors hurtling across the sky.
This always happens after I take a break from the blog. I have too much to say, too many words. And instead of rolling them out and telling a story in any kind of concise format, I just BLECH all over the page and my fingers move faster than my head. So please bear with me. I promise I’ll make myself stop around the 1,000 word mark because – in one of the most overused phrases ever – ain’t nobody got time for that.
So. Caroline turned ten on August 3 and we left that very day for a week at the beach. That was her birthday request, to spend her birthday at the beach with some family friends. And so we combined her birthday with our annual beach vacation because that’s what you call killing two birds with one stone. Except easier.
But I didn’t mention we were headed to the beach because P doesn’t like when I tell the world wide web that we are out of town. You never know when the members of a crime ring might be reading and take the opportunity to come help themselves to our fabulous collection of plastic cups and tens of dollars worth of costume jewelry.
Anyway, we all arrived in Port Aransas late Saturday afternoon and met up with P. He’d been down there since Thursday because he was fishing in a tournament and, although the tournament was on Saturday, it was important that they pre-fish on Friday. Yes. Pre-fishing is a real thing. Maybe you’re like me and wonder how they know the fish won’t swim elsewhere over the next twenty-four hours. I wish I could tell you but no one has been able to explain it to me. They just know.
We all got settled in on Saturday evening, ate pizza and then let Caroline open her birthday presents. This is her reading the card that Gulley’s boys got her. It had a punchline about monkey butts that was clearly a crowd pleaser.
Best of all, she got a Glimmer Art kit and gave us all our very own glittery tattoo to sport on the beach the next day. Because you know what they say, “When in Port Aransas, do as the Port Aransians do.”
(I don’t know that anyone has actually said that except me.)
The next morning we hit the beach. We set up our tents and our chairs and our coolers and our Fritos and bean dip. And that pretty much describes the next four days. We built sandcastles and dug holes. We fished and looked for sand dollars. We rode waves until we could barely stand up.
(Clearly I didn’t take these next two photos because they are far too good. These are the work of my dear friend Leslie.)
It was delightful. The only hiccup came when Gulley’s husband, Jon, got stung by a stingray on our second day there. To his credit he didn’t pass out, but he was white as a sheet when he came hobbling out of the water. But P went into emergency preparedness mode and assessed the situation, determined the course of action and drove him back to the house so he could soak his foot in hot water. Did you know that was what you do for a stingray sting? Neither did I until I googled it on the beach. And our friend Pat knew that the biggest risk is some sort of terrible bacterial skin-eating infection that could kill you, so he made up a bleach/water mixture to clean the wound. Meanwhile, the moms stayed on the beach with the kids and ate bean dip and helped them make sand castles because we were all a little leery of the actual ocean for a few hours afterwards.
I mean you know that there are stingrays and jellyfish and sharks out there, but you try not to think about it. And then you get confirmation that, yes, there are things in the surf that view you as part of the food chain and it kind of puts a damper on things for awhile.
Everyone else drove home late Wednesday afternoon, but we stayed until Thursday. Caroline was beyond exhausted after five days of non-stop fun, yet she was determined to get up early Thursday morning to fish with P. By the time they made it back to the house and we started to pack up the car, I looked over and she’d passed out cold on the couch. Bless her.
And so we made it back home with at least 75% of all the sand that used to be on the beach in Port Aransas. I spent the rest of Thursday washing load after load of laundry and unpacking coolers and all those other fun vacation chores that you don’t know about when you’re a kid because you get to pass out on the couch. Then, late Thursday night Gulley texted me to let me know that Jon had hurt his ankle (not the same foot as the stingray sting) while playing basketball and they were headed to the ER.
As it turns out, he tore a ligament and is now in a cast and needs crutches for the indefinite future. Needless to say, he’s had a rough week.
Which is why, after P read last night that an almost 12 foot shark was caught in the surf at Port Aransas, Jon said he was glad he wasn’t there because I think we can all agree it might not have ended well.
But the bottom line is it was a great week. One of those times we’ll look back on all year round and feel blessed for the time spent with good friends, good food and enough fun to cause us all to want to sleep for days after we got home.
(Photo by Leslie again because, yeah right, like I could capture this.)
