dunes day - part 1

Friday morning when I woke up, I had no plans for the weekend, other than maybe shopping and the usual housework, and it sounded lovely.

Friday afternoon one of my friends sent a message round to the girls asking if anyone was up for one of several different activities, one of them being a day at the the beach about 2 hours away. At first I thought, wow, there goes my whole Saturday and I will not accomplish anything if we do that. But the more I thought about escaping to the beach... It ended up that all 5 of us wanted to go to the beach, even last-minute.

So Saturday morning we got up not too early and somehow got ourselves together and packed up all our supplies (including lots of snacks) and went to buy water and still more snacks ('cause you don't want to starve at the beach... what a dreadful way to go!)  Finally around noon we left Warsaw. Of course, I offered to drive us in Cherry. So there we all were cozy in a zippy little red car, deeply anticipating the beach joys ahead.

It took us a little bit to get there because, for some reason, Highway 31 turned into Business 31 and 933 and was no longer itself. So at the last minute we swerved left onto the 80/90 toll road (Ok... so we didn't quite swerve) and had not even gone all the way up the ramp onto that highway before we discovered that staying on 933 would have intersected us with 12 after all. Oh well. So we stayed on 80/90, we got tired of the radio and started messing around with one of my CDs to put in, the girls decided to listen to the "handsome guys" (Il Divo) which I was pretty happy about because (A) I thought I had lost that CD months ago, (B) I love their music. Well by the time we had got it safely in I saw a sign passing and gasped, "Oh - did we want 12??"  Thankfully my extensive experience of turning around enabled us to get quickly back on track. Then we didn't see the name of the next road so...passed that one too. Then we were finally on Broken Arrow highway... Oh wait. They kept telling me it was Red Arrow or something. I don't know why I had Broken Arrow stuck in my head.

By this time Sharon is feeling quite short on protein and I confess if there's one thing that makes me irritable... So I insisted that we stick to the original plan and stop to get some lunch. The first place we stopped did not allow take-out. So we went across the road to a Mexican grill and we all ended up getting 1 taco apiece. And took them with us to the beach which we FINALLY reached!!

~~ by now you are probably about ready to quit reading for the day... I wouldn't blame you ~~

When we first got out of the car we were kind of surprised to find that it did not feel so deliciously hot as it had back in Warsaw, and even rather cloudy up here. I began to think it wasn't very smart to not have brought sleeves. But the AngloSaxon spirit in me rose to the occasion, as it usually does, and we all got ourselves down to the beach and settled on our towels with our tacos.

I can't even convey the sweet peace and happiness of finally having a full tummy. And my less-than-8-hours of sleep and the increasing warmth of the day came to bear on me until I clunked out on my towel... Well not until I had lathered sun screen all over. I even had Stacey help me with the back. Unfortunately while I was proactively thinking about that, I totally forgot about my chest and so... But that will come up later in the story. And finally, after this exhausting effort of putting on sunscreen, I collapsed on my towel and began the afternoon with almost falling asleep on the beach.

Well, I am not sure this story really merits 2 parts but I guess that is what will happen!