ComfortZone

This has been a week­end of rest, fun, and unex­pected things.

Deanne and the boys and I have spent a few days at Twin Rocks—not the camp at Twin Rocks, but at the beach house of our long-​time friend Tina. She and her hus­band Mike are loan­ing us this awe­some house for our get-​away after Deanne’s grad­u­a­tion. It seems odd still to be at “Twin Rocks”, but not at “Twin Rocks”.

First unex­pected thing: it looked like we were in for some rain while here, but this is the morn­ing of our fourth day, and all we have seen are the remains of some minor sprin­kles during the night. Each over­cast morn­ing has turned into sun­shine by the end of the day!

Next unex­pected thing: We really wanted to ride go-​carts and the old-​fashioned bumper cars in Sea­side, but nei­ther were oper­at­ing yet. Hmmm. The next best thing… we hit the arcades. This is prob­a­bly a first for us! It wasn’t what we planned, but we had fun anyway and got rid of a lot of quar­ters. (They did have some more modern bumper cars in the back, that were fun!)

On Sat­ur­day we decided to look up Deanne’s sister Brenda, whom we haven’t seen or spoken with in a long time. It turned out to be an impor­tant and suc­cess­ful visit. My brother Ken had run into her unex­pect­edly down here a week or so ago while he was at Pas­tors Con­fer­ence, and so it seemed the time was right to go find her and recon­nect some­thing that’s been broken.

I was self­ishly fear­ful at first, (I didn’t want to add some­thing like that to a rest­ful get-​away), but then had a change of heart in the night and agreed that it was an impor­tant thing to do. Thank­fully, Brenda was at home in her RV park, and we had a very con­struc­tive visit. We plan to return with Lucille (Brenda and Deanne’s mother) on Mother’s Day. There’s another rela­tion­ship that needs some repairs and a new start.

Head­ing off towards the beach again we went to the sleepy out-​of-​the-​way town of Ocean­side. We were curi­ous about all of the “Boy­cott the Anchor” signs there. It seemed like half the houses had them and the other half didn’t. (Here’s the reason for this incred­i­bly sad divi­sion of a small sea side community.)

Next we went to Cape Meares, with it’s storm-​ravaged old growth forest, Gigan­tic spruce tree and light­house. Unex­pect­edly, the light­house and gift shop closed at 4, min­utes before we arrived at the door.

(And yes, Austin is now the tallest in our family!)

We did find some­thing to put my one last quar­ter into!