It was hot somewhere

I love the Oregon coast. Really, I do. I just dislike a few things about our lovely coast here in Oregon. For one, I hate that you have to make a reservation to camp eons in advance, so you never know what the weather will be like. For another, I hate that it never seems to be warm there. (see: here and here and here.) Nevertheless, I refuse to give up on the beach. I mean, it has SAND and OCEAN and MOUNTAINS. It is a pretty cool place despite the fact that I can never win weather-wise.

I made reservations to camp at the beach when we decided to give those whole mountain bike racing thing a try in Vernonia. Never one to turn down an opportunity to spend the night away from home, I grabbed one of the last campsites available and smugly started making plans.

To my chagrin, it was the sunniest, warmest weekend in Portland of 2010.

Of course.

We tried to convince ourselves that it would be just as warm at the beach as it was in Portland.

HA HA. We are funny people. At least it was hot in Vernonia. It was one hot and muddy and sweaty bike race and I LOVED IT, all 45 minutes of it.

And I will be doing it again very, very soon.

The beach however? Not hot and sweaty. More like "brisk" and "windy" and "cold". To its credit, it was sunny on Saturday. Not so much on Sunday, when it rained. Bleh.

We made the best of it because we don't want Hizz to be a wuss like ourselves. We braved the wind and the cold and we played in the sand, damnit. For as long as we could stand it anyway.

On Sunday, my head apparently could not take one more drop of rain and proceeded to knock me in to submission by way of a splitting headache for the whole day. Barkernews kindly drove home and unpacked the trailer, all while entertaining Hizz. He's a good man, this one.

That night, I turned to Barkernews and said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for dragging us to the beach when we had awesome weather in Portland. I'm sorry my ridiculous headache made me no fun on Sunday. I'm just sorry." And then he looked at me incredulously and said, "What the hell are you talking about? I had a GREAT weekend!"

Despite the disappointing weather, the obnoxious headache, and the mosquito attacks, I guess we did have a great weekend. Barkernews came in third in his race. We got to eat hamburgers and chat it up at the Lions Club cookout at the lake in Vernonia. (Want to make an elderly person's day? Bring a joyful toddler around. Mission accomplished.) Hazel covered herself in mud. We sat around a campfire. We devoured s'mores. We built castles in the sand. Barkernews and Haze walked the docks in Astoria. Upon arrival at home, Barkernews and Hazel still had enough time to ride their bike to the food carts for ice cream and then the playground.

So it wasn't perfect. But it was a great weekend.