Labor Day Adventure

So we had the craziest adventure in honor of Labor Day. While watching the BYU game on Saturday with some friends Nathan was talking about how we would like to go camping. However, being late planers where could we go? Nathan had heard you can go camping on Matagorda beach here in Texas and that it would not require having a camping spot reserved. Sounded like fun. Kind of last minute, but we decided to go anyway with the Wirthlins.

When we first got to the beach around 6pm it was super windy. Nate and John tried to start a fire by digging a hole in the sand and then blocking as much of the wind as they could with our coolers and a beach umbrella, but the elements proved to be more powerful and after about a half hour and some rain we gave up on the fire for awhile. John and Ellice brought a plug in griddle for making pancakes on in the morning, which we decided to cook our hot dogs on kielbasa style. However, that didn't work out so well. Even with a power converter the griddle blew two fuses in their van. So we ended up heading to a burger joint/bar that Nathan had heard from one of his coworkers was really good. By this point we were all starving and tired of the wind. Though the restaurant was not much of a break from the wind, all the walls were just mesh screens, the food was good and as you normally do when starving we ordered too much food!

While at the restaurant we looked up on the iphone when the wind was suppose to settle down and found the prediction to be around midnight. So we headed back to the beach and struggled up our tents/kites and weighed them down with stuff in each corner. Here is Nate and John setting up the first tent. The cute little dancing girl here is Abby.

You can see we used the light of headlights to set up the tents.

After getting the tent up and using the little cove created by the cars and the tents as cover Nathan and John got a pretty good fire going. Here below is the Wirthlin family, Abby, John, Dallin and Ellice. Their youngest Conner was already asleep in the tent and missed out on the smores and Starburts.

Corinne was really good for pretty much the entire trip. For the most part she was content to just hang out, drink a bottle and be held. I was a bit worried about her with the sand and the fire but it ended up not being an issue.

After looking at the amazing stars for a bit we sat around the fire chatting until Corinne and I were dozing in the beach chair. I went and laid down with Corinne and she went right to sleep. Nathan stayed up chatting until around midnight or 1am. Cars were driving past us all night long and while laying there with the wind keeping us from really falling asleep that the cars changed from driving behind us closer to the water on the compact sand "road" to driving around in front of our tents in the really soft sand that you just get stuck in. We had parked as close to the soft sand as we thought we could go with out getting the cars stuck. There was a huge area of compacted sand that people had been driving and parking on all day so we thought it was weird that people started going around in the soft sand instead. Well around 3 or 3:30 Nathan decided to go out and check on the cars and the tide. I don't know if it was because he could see through the tent window that the tide had risen or just because I kept asking "are you sure the cars are ok," but when we got outside this is what we saw.

The tide had risen considerably and was already at the tires of the cars and the corner of our tent. Nathan woke up John and Ellice as their tent was also starting to get wet. Nathan debated just moving the tents further up the beach, but since we didn't know how high the water was going to go I was pushing for us to just pack up and get off the beach. So with us already parked in the soft sand this didn't leave us much of an exit route. We would have to either go in the soft sand and hope to not get stuck or the water. We got packed up pretty quick. Taking down the tents consisted of removing the tent poles and then rolling them up and stuffing them in the bed of the truck. We just put some stuff on to p of them to keep them from blowing away, contrary to the earlier prediction the wind never did die down.

So after getting turned around we headed down the to the area where you could get off and we were going fine until we came to an abandoned truck that we had to go deeper into the soft sand to go around. The truck got stuck pretty good here. The van did too, but probably only because they stopped when they saw the truck was stuck. When driving on soft sand you want to just keep moving or you get stuck. The truck had the axles touching the sand. While we were mourning our fate another truck with 4 wheel drive and 4 college age guys with beers in hand drove up. At first one of the guys was convinced that with the four of them and Nate and John they could just pick up the back end of the truck out of the hole it had dug. When that did not work they dug us out and pushed. Someone in their truck had the forethought to bring gardening hoes. They were our drunk angels! They helped dig and push both cars 3 or 4 times each. It took about an hour and a half to go less than a mile to get off the beach. We finally rolled into home around 6am and then slept until 11am when Corinne woke us up.

Later that day we got together and ate Thai food and made dutch oven cobbler in the Wirthlin's garage. It rained all day too. After getting back we checked when the high tide occured and it did not happen until around 6am. It was also the highest high tide in the recent history and forecast. I think the storm surge from the tropical storm probably helped with the high tide. I'm glad we didn't wait around any longer before leaving. Even with the hasty departure it was a really fun adventure and I would be willing to go again if we check the tide first and get a 4 wheel drive truck!

You can also read about this awesome adventure on Ellice's blog. http://wirthlin-family.blogspot.com/2010/09/awesome-adventure.html