Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I'm late writing this, I know, but it always takes a bit to adjust to normal life after a long car trip. And then there was Halloween. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last week was our annual trip to the Oregon coast. I used my first PTO day, and we left Thursday night right after work/school. From our place to Florence is only a ten hour drive -- not too shabby -- but we thought since it is such a short trip and we would beat Jon and Faith there either way, we would split the trip up in half. So we planned on camping at the halfway point, which, conveniently enough, was around the Mount Shasta area and there were plenty of campgrounds to choose from.

We went with the campground that looked closest to the highway since it was almost midnight when we arrived and we didn't want to get too lost. It was a nice campground, though a bit close to the highway for my taste (i.e. noise from cars could be heard at the campsite). On the other hand, I do remember clinging to the reassuring thought that a major road was nearby in case we ran into any ax-murderers or escaped convicts..(we tried to scare each other because it's strange to be at a campground without anyone around you). :) And it was definitely nice not to feel exhausted from driving all night the next day! We packed up camp right after we woke up and continued our trip north. [It should be noted that we slept on hard gravel. I slept like a log, and Rebecca woke up with bruises. -wayne]

We arrived in Florence Friday afternoon and hung out on the beach for a few hours, got dinner, and read a book to each other while we waited for Jon and Faith and Brynna to arrive. We were glad they made better time than they estimated, because we almost fell asleep in our tent waiting for them! But we woke up quickly, mostly because we were excited to see them again, but also because we joked about the car on the dirt road being an axe-murderer and not our friends. We were warming up for Halloween with our silly scary jokes, I guess. :)

We continued our warm up by playing a game called AtmosFear several times while we were in Oregon, in addition to several of our more usual games. It was a good visit; we went to the jetty a couple of times, went to our favorite game and toy store in downtown Florence, and reflected on good memories and stories. We had Chinese food in Florence. On the coast. It was a strange thing to eat on the coast, I think, but we had a good waitress, so it's all good.

And Sunday we hung out until just after noon and began the drive home so we wouldn't be too exhausted for work and school Monday morning. It would have been nice to be able to visit longer, but we had the time we needed on the coast and in the car; it's nice to make long car trips every so often and take time to really think and reflect on things. I like good car trips.