Sarah Sluis and I went camping at Cape Lookout State Park on August 4 - 7, 2003! We had a blast. Here's a journal of our spectacular summer vacation!! It's a little more detailed than the rest of the journals, but this trip absolutely ROCKED, so I can't help but share all the little details with you. Enjoy!

Check out some pictures from the trip!

MONDAY Sarah came over to pick me up around 8:45. We rearranged our stuff in the car to make it all fit, and then Sarah discovered she'd left all her clothes at home. It was just like some of my escape nightmares where we, the escapees, have an opportunity to leave undiscovered, but my companion(s) keep forgetting things inside the house, and we don't leave in time, and we get caught by the bad guys. But luckily Sarah was inside for only a few seconds and I could relax. We set out onto the highway!! And we went driving along for about 20 minutes before we came to a traffic light and realized we weren't on the highway anymore. In fact, I think we were on 5th street or something. Caution, drivers passing through Seattle! Watch the signs very closely, lest your lane suddenly turn itself into an exit.

Mapquest said the trip was supposed to be 5 1/2 hours, but we got to the Cheese Factory in Tillamook in only four, even with some construction-work stops along the way. We were impressed with ourselves. Cruise control became our friend, and as Sarah was experimenting with it toward the beginning of the drive, she asked me, "Which one's the brake?" I must say I was a little alarmed� That statement belongs in the category of "What you Don't Want to Hear While You're Speeding Down the Freeway".

The cheese factory was good! We took the self-guided tour, somehow in the opposite order (I'm pretty sure they make the cheese before they package it�), and had some ice cream. They have some really awesome flavors there, like CHOCOLATE AND PEANUT BUTTER, which is the best flavor in the universe. Of course, I ended up dripping on my new pants, the ones I bought off Sarah a couple days before. But all the rest of it ended up in my tummy. Mmmm!

We checked into our campsite at 3:00. Up until the minute the park people let us in to our campsite, I had this awful feeling that somehow I might have messed up our reservation and that maybe we'd driven down for nothing. But thankfully I'm not as much of an idiot as sometimes I fear that I am� It was a great day for the beach. Weather.com said it was supposed to rain off and on for the whole trip, but our weather was GREAT the first day. Too bad we didn't get there the day before so we could fully enjoy it. It was nice and warm and sunny. We set up the tent at our campsite pretty quickly, and we set off to the beach with our books, chairs, and journals. As we were walking away from our campsite two guys came up to us and started a conversation. It lasted less than a minute, in which time we both discerned that these two were perhaps not the finest that Oregon has to offer. They were both smoking, for one, and the word f*** came up in the first three sentences. They must have been members of the Winner's Club.

I was so tired when we sat down on the beach that I immediately fell asleep. I didn't get much sleep the night beore, and the sand was so warm and the sun was baking me like a little spud. It felt so good! I napped really hard. It was kind of like that post-anesthesia grogginess where you can't really talk but think you can, and it's all you can do to roll over to another position. I'm telling you, I was in potato heaven! I eventually woke up and looked around, but Sarah was gone. I swore I had just seen her a few seconds before, but that was probably a few seconds in nap-time, which is different than actual time. So she was long gone by then. I started to get worried, because I was kind of in a daze still and I was all alone, and I couldn't see her down the beach. I left her a note, walked to the bathroom, and came back and she was there. Thank goodness! I actually started to make myself sick over it. It was kind of weird.

Dinner! Yeah� The plan was to roast hot dogs over a blazing flame. We had the hot dogs, but the blazing flame was slightly trickier. The two of us aren't well-versed in the art of making a fire. We tried EVERYTHING, and in the end, six false starts and 25 matches later, we had parts of the logs emitting heat enough to horribly disfigure our hotdogs. It was a great team-building exercise.

Later that night when it was really dark, after s'mores (mmmm!), we walked down the beach. Sarah sang songs ranging from Mariah Carey to Les Miserables, and finally to animated Disney classics. That girl has a real talent for memorizing lyrics! She sang Ursula's scary voice-snatching song from "The Little Mermaid" while I twirled and did interpretive dance and tried not to fall over. It was a great day.

TUESDAY I wanted pancakes so bad! Dang that stupid freaking stove!! I finally managed to get all the steps in the right order, and then I just about lit my hand on fire. Huge yellow flames were coming from the stove, and one of our attempts ended in the whole inside of the stove catching fire, whereupon Sarah suggested that we throw some water on it. NEVER PUT WATER ON A GREASE FIRE! I was a little wary of Sarah's tips on fire safety, since the night before she thought we should throw some gasoline on the fire to help get it started. Rule number one of camping: Try not to kill yourself.

I really wanted the weather to be good. A whole lot. But it started raining during our little stove experiment, and we ended up just eating more bread. We walked on the beach again after it appeared to have stopped, and we found three whole sand dollars. This was very exciting. Usually the birds peck the HECK out of them before anybody can find them, but what can I say? We're naturals. I still really wanted pancakes, and I was especially frustrated at not being able to work that dang stove, so I went back a little ahead of Sarah and decided to show that stove who's the man! I did get it to work, although I still did have an alarmingly high flame, but even though we forgot a spatula and didn't have enough grease on the pan, we still made some semblance of a bread product and poured a little syrup on it. I was satisfied.

I got this intense urge to go boogie boarding. The weather was still pretty un-good, and I knew it would be cold beyond imagining, but I finally convinced (bribed) Sarah to come with me since it's dangerous to go swimming alone. I broke in my new black suit, and my Scrub-a-Pup t-shirt got some salt water action. It was SO FREAKING AWESOME! Nobody else was in the water the entire beach long, not even in a wetsuit, but we jumped in anyway. I've never had so much fun in the water before! It's a good thing we wore the t-shirts because we would have rubbed our stomachs raw on the sand by the end. We were catching all these waves that took us right to the shore, and it was so much more fun because it was bad weather, as weird as that sounds. People must have thought we were crazy! In fact, our new neighbors that we met after we got back to camp asked us if we were "those two crazy girls with the boogie boards". I was proud.

Our new neighbors gave us some extra wood, some bark, and put some lighter fluid on our fire. It started 30 minutes and 22 matches faster than the night before, and we were really grateful. I figured out that their daughters' names were Sarah and Laurel. Interesting coincidence.

WEDNESDAY Our stupid stove broke! I had my heart set on having french toast, and I was not about to have another crappy breakfast. So we lit up the fire again and cooked at turbo-speed. They turned out really great, and we felt so accomplished and fantastical. After breakfast we did the typical tent-hibernation deal, Sarah reading her book and me listening to my Jewel "0304" CD that I am absolutely in love with. Whoever is reading this, if you don't have that CD, you MUST buy it. It's the best purchase I have made in a long time. This was also the time that we realized the true extent of some maple syrup spillage that had occurred during the ride over. Any time we took anything out of the food crate, it would have maple syrup on it! I think what happened is that the maple syrup laid eggs on everything else in the crate, and then they all hatched. I mean, if we had lost the syrup before our french toast was cooked, we could have just rubbed parts of our tomato soup cans, our hot dog buns, and our orange juice container onto the stuff and been A-OK.

The weather was much better that day, so we took our swim stuff, shower stuff, and lunch to the beach with us for the day. After lying in the sun for 30 minutes, I got bored and went boogie boarding for an hour by myself. Sarah wouldn't come with me. I was sad, but of course I still had a great time. I found this huge crab underwater in the shallow part, and I kept trying to avoid it because I couldn't tell if it was alive or dead and didn't really want to find out, either. I boogied and boogied and boogied some more. It was fantastic. After almost an hour I thought maybe I should get out and take a quick break, because I was really cold and getting kind of tired. Soon I discovered that I was too far out and I couldn't get back to shore. I have to say I was legitimately scared there for a few minutes while I was trying to swim back in, but I kept getting sucked farther out and my legs and arms were so tired� Finally I just gave it all I had and kicked and kicked, and kicked extra hard whenever any kind of wave started to form that could maybe push me toward the beach. It was really frightening not to be able to get out when I needed to. But of course I was back in the water (with Sarah this time!) after just 5 minutes on the sand. We had a blast. And I think I crunched the crab. Oops!

It turns out I got a MOTHER of a sunburn that day. I couldn't tell when it was happening, even after I got out of the water and laid on the sand for a little bit more. My legs mostly survived the ordeal, but my face, neck, hands, arms, shoulders, back, chest, stomach, and feet got frickin' FRIED. Sarah got burned, too, but for her it was her legs. She should have gone boogie-boarding with me and at least evened it out a little. I joked that if you put her legs on my body, you'll have the most sunburned individual in America. But I am clearing up, thanks to some aloe and a temporary vampire-like lifestyle ("NOOO, not the light!!").

Our friendly neighbors didn't have any more lighter fluid, so we were back to figuring out how to do it on our own. We considered using the fuel for our camping stove, since we might as well use the fuel for something now that the stove was broken. We read the label, and the fourth warning on the side of the can is "DO NOT USE AS A FIRE STARTER." Sarah reasoned, "Well, it's not the first warning on the can�" so we used it anyway. (By the way, the first warning on the can basically tells you not to drink it.) Thank the LORD she dropped the match in the fire instead of holding it in there, because the second that match hit the wood, huge flames LEAPT up in the air. I think now we know why we weren't supposed to use it as a fire starter�

We went for another beach walk and sang some more songs. This time we had already done all the good Disney ones, so we moved on to songs from The Sound of Music, including the puppet show yodeling song and the one they do on the carriage ride "do-mi-mi, mi-sol-sol, re-fa-fa, la-ti-ti�". We also did some nice wholesome patriotic tunes toward the end, mostly because I suck at lyrics and those are the only songs that I know all the words to. That was a great night.

THURSDAY Our last day. :( It was very sad. I did meet a really nice lady in the bathroom when I was brushing my teeth. She thought the Monsters, Inc. tattoo on my left ankle was real! Ha ha! I knew I could fool somebody. She and I talked about travelling and about tattoos. She had one on her second toe, and she said she did it because of some song that Goldie Hawn sang on a TV show she used to be on. The lady said it hurt worse than having her three children. I guess toes are sensitive� Sarah and I packed up all our stuff into the car, and we went to the beach one last time. The sun was burning me like Hades through my sweatshirt. I read a little of this book called "The Good Journey" which might actually turn out to be quite nice. The last time I read a little of the beginning, I was half-asleep and most of it didn't make much sense.

We listened to music most of the way home, and we made a quick stop at the Cheese Factory for some cheese curds and ice cream. The one stop we did make on the way back was at a shopping center in Portland (actually, it may have been just outside Portland). The mall was really desolate and kind of creepy, and it didn't have great stores in it like we were hoping. It made us even more tired than we were when we were driving, which was not the point of stopping there. But I did buy a sweatshirt-y thingy at Old Navy tax-free! So it was a worthwhile stop. As we were getting back onto the freeway, we almost crashed into the car ahead of us. If we had made contact it would have been a minor collision, but still, it's just not good to hit people. Jewel kept us company on the way home - I think I've made a fan out of Sarah! It's exciting to spread the love.

This trip was so so so so fun!! I can't wait to go camping again next year!!