Halfway there

This is the fifteenth day of my holiday, so I’m now at the halfway point: every day from now on, there’s less days until I go back to work. Tomorrow is also the first day we get a chance to sleep in beds, which will feel like unimaginable luxury when we hit Portland.
We went to beaches today. I really don’t like beaches in general, and was dreading wandering around on the sand. But after spending half an hour in Cannon Beach looking for a bucket and spade, I ended up actually enjoying myself, building sandcastles with the girls (and then knocking them down). The girls had some metagame where they ran a waterproof concrete supply company (this entailed tipping dry sand over the existing sandcastle) and everything went swimmingly.

We had lunch at a brewery (surprise surprise) and this time I ate some meat, sharing a burger with my wife. It was … adequate. Not awful, not stellar, although the bacon jam was a highlight.

Then we drove from Cannon Beach to Seaside, backtracking from where we’d started, and went to another beach.

Seaside is grottier than Cannon Beach. There’s rough looking people riding around on beat up old bicycles, the housing is much scruffier and there are people wandering around in Trump 2020 sweatshirts. Still, we stayed on the deserted beach itself and looked at sand dollars, then drove back to Astoria at the end of the day for another charge of the car.

I was desperate for the toilet and ran down the hill from the community college to downtown, but the public toilet was locked, and most shops won’t let anyone use their restrooms. Thankfully I found a brewery before I publicly disgraced myself, bought a four pack of beer as some sort of thank you for basic human decency, then ascended the hill again and drove back to the campsite.

The kids, who were good all day, both went mental about 7:30, but they were exhausted by then. It’s clear that the days where we manage our own fatigue end much better than the ones where we’re losing the plot with their craziness. Another three chapters of my story about pigs and camels done, and everyone is asleep.