Trial Run

 "Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody."    Mark Twain

Okay, so we're preparing for cross-country road trip #2!  We bought a new tent (after the floating-on-the-air-matress in the pouring rain camping last summer), and decided to try it out.  Found a cancellation on the sand at Doheny beach on our first week out of school, and we're off!  We arrived in Doheny at our perfect site on  a sunny, breezy day, set up and settled in.  The tent is great (best advice ever, Kim.  Get a tent you can stand up in!), and the view was unbeatable.

We watched the sea and the surfers and took a long walk on the beach at twilight.  Beautiful.  The campers around us were impressed by Mimi's ability to build a great campfire (did you know that graph paper is a wonderful fire-starter?), and we got ready to make our super S'mores.  Surf watching was particularly fun as there was a high-surf warning and the waves were impressive.

Let me digress here for a moment.  We are not campers.  We have camped on several occasions with experienced campers, and ventured out the one time on our own (see the aforementioned floating in 3 inches of water in the leaking tent).  Still, we're adventurous and pretty good sports, so what could go wrong?  About a week before this latest trip (after the tent, car carrier... were already purchased) we started discussing our camping experiences and came up with 1) camping in Yosemite in 26 degree weather with a deflated air mattress -- the longest, coldest night of my life.  (It was supposed to be 3 nights, but we went to the Awahnee Hotel and begged for shelter the 2nd night, and then went home early); 2) Our backpacking trip down the Grand Canyon where Mimi injured her knees, my toenails fell off, our food was stolen by the young men in the next camp, and the drunken guide forgot to pick us up for our pack trip out; 3) Renting all our camping equipment and driving to Jalama Beach to camp with Lisa and Kim (surprise!  but invited), only to find they had driven home early; and, 4)  our adventure in the Maine campground with the thunderstorms, flash flood warnings, and flooded tent.  It suddenly occurred to us: What if camping is really just awful?  Well, we were committed (or should be).

Back to Doheny.  As the campfire grew bright in the dusk, we prepared our S'mores and watched increasingly large waves.  As the evening went on, the water crested the berm in front of us.  The campers next door said, "High tide is at 8:30, so if you're still here at 9 you'll be fine."

 Easy for them to say, from the comfort of their RV!  At 8:15, a giant wave hit, but barely came over the berm 20 feet in front of us.  However, the screaming down the beach, and the smoke from water-extinguished campfires told us it had flooded other campsites.  Then we watched as the water pushed tsunami-like, laterally across the beach wiping out the campsites down the line next to us.  We scrambled to pull up stakes (Mimi's a really good staker) as the water crept closer, and just managed, with the help of the RV guys next door to literally "pull up stakes" and lift our tent before the flood!  The area where our tent had been was 4 inches deep in water!

So much for the Trial Run!  We're rethinking this camping idea a little.  Do we just have particularly bad luck, or is Nature trying to tell us something ("Stay in a hotel.  Stay in a hotel.")?  In any case, we're out of school, we're at a beautiful beach, and we have another story for the books!

We waited out high tide, staked our tent on a patch of dry sand, and slept to the sound of crashing waves.  Not a bad night after all.