Mother's Day at the Coast: A Play in 5 Acts...

Prologue

OK, so every year my family cruises over to this rental beach house for Mother’s Day Weekend and we stay there through Friday and Saturday and most of Sunday. There are roughly 16 to 18 of us, give or take, and we have some specific goals each year:

• eat
• play games with gamey abandon
  
• seriously, eat
• puzzles, puzzles, puzzles, PUZZLES, puzzles!
  
• inhale junk food like it’s about to become prohibitive
• optimistically hope for the view of a whale, any whale, out at sea
• hey, are you going to eat that? (yeah, me too)

This year was no exception and fabulous coastal time was had by all! So I present to you “Mother’s Day Weekend at the Coast: A Play in 5 Acts” (and by “play” I mean “here’s some stuff we did or that happened or something.” And by “5 Acts” I mean “5 blog posts”.)

Act One: Photo Phun with the Cool Cousin

I drove over to the beach house (a drive of about 2 hours) with my super-cool cousin. She’s more like a niece, in that she’s almost 20 years younger than I am, but then there’s that pesky fact that her parents are my aunt and uncle, thereby demanding that she be my cousin. There are rules, people.

Anyway, cool cousin (we’ll call her Pepe. She knows why) got into photography after the gifting of a grandparent’s very nice film camera when she graduated from high school and ever since she and I occasionally run off for fun-camera-artsy-adventure-stuff-day-things. Friday afternoon we hit the road and when we reached ocean views we started hunting for cool photo opps. We wanted tide pools, which we found, but we discovered that there were pretty much all under many, many feet of ocean. Some crazy thing about a “high Tide” which I’m pretty sure is environmentalist propaganda to keep nature all to themselves.

Eventually we found some excellent tide pool action amidst all this dramatic lava rock and we climbed hither and flan looking for “that magic shot”. (I never found magic – mostly the photo equivalent of pulling a quarter out of nature’s ear or a ninja smoke bomb) At one moment I was suddenly struck with the COMPLETE STUPIDITY of my clambering over these rocks, my most beloved camera (which I love and have GREAT love for and also wove-wove-wove and would marry if they’d let me) hanging around my neck, just asking for that moment where I trip and HULK SMASH on my precious big lens. Not to MENTION the constant threat of huge ocean waves crashing all over these rocks every 30 seconds, waiting for me to look the other way so that they could sneak up on me and swallow me up WITH THE MOST BELOVED CAMERA. If I’d ever found photo magic I know it would have been worth it, but since I didn’t it was just temporary insanity.

But it was fun, and I did pull that photo-quarter from nature’s ear, and nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?



…tomorrow: the games beach people play…