Labor Day Weekend

I started Labor Day weekend thinking Matt was going to work the entire time and I would be shuttling the kids back and forth between soccer games all by myself. As luck would have it though, Matt's last two shifts of the summer were cancelled, so we packed up and headed to Padre Island National Seashore for some fun in the sun! At 70 miles long, Padre Island is the longest undeveloped barrier island in the world. Surprisingly, there weren't many visitors so it wasn't hard to find a secluded area to do some primitive camping. We ended up about 25 miles down and there wasn't a soul around us! It was awesome! We were so remote that we saw a coyote on the beach. Pretty cool, I suppose... When the moon started to rise, it was bright red. I thought it was eerie, but the boys thought it was awesome. It gradually changed to white, but none of us had ever seen anything like it. Once the moon was overhead, the crabs came out of their little holes and were running all over the beach. We spent about an hour running and chasing the crabs and the boys LOVED it! The crabs ran so quickly and often times they would run sideways, so you really couldn't project where they were headed. Silly things apparently don't know how to run in a straight direction! Instead, they pretty much just ran in circles. T1 and T2 were laughing and loving it; one even ran across T2's feet and he thought that was hilarious. T3 was a little stand-offish, so I held him most of the time, but we ran from the crabs together and he thought that was pretty funny. When we were done chasing the crabs (and T1 had caught and released quite a few), T3 walked into our tent and yelled "BA!", which was his way of saying crab. There was a big ol' crab in our tent and a couple underneath it. It was pretty funny.

T2, T3, and I went to bed and T1 and Matt went to fish in the surf. I was thinking that this was turning out to be a pretty great trip, but little did I know there was a huge storm headed our way. I woke up at 3:15 a.m. to rain dripping on me. I quickly woke Matt up and he rushed to get the rain fly set-up to protect our tent (and us) from the rain. Although the rain fly helped a lot, much our stuff still got drenched. When that storm passed, we could see another storm headed towards us, so we decided to stay awake until it passed. Fortunately, the second storm somehow circled right around us, but we were all awake until 5:45 a.m. during this ordeal. At one point, it started sprinkling so everyone climbed into the truck to weather the storm under a hard roof and eat some yummy donuts we had brought with us. Everyone except T1 was in a good mood, so it wasn't really that bad. I was the last person to wake up at 7:30 the next morning, so you can imagine how tired our crew was.

The next day was spent casually on the beach. T1 and I hunted for seashells and Matt drove us another 10 miles down the beach to an even more remote place. This area of the beach probably had solid seashells 40 feet from the tide and the shells were probably 2 feet deep. I've never seen anything like it. We didn't find many big shells, but we did find several beautiful and different shells. We also found shells that had been reshaped and worn down from many, many years of erosion on that beach. These transformed shells still held their coloring and they were gorgeous! T1 and I could have spent hours looking at the shells, but everyone else was bored with the prospect.

What else? Oh yeah, T1 got stung by a jellyfish while playing in the ocean. Thank goodness I had read a warning online about jellyfish before we left and saw that the Park staff recommended bringing a combination of meat tenderizer and vinegar to alleviate the pain. While I wish we didn't need to use this concoction, I must say it worked like a charm! T1 said the pain went away almost immediately.

Here are a few pictures from our trip. It was fun and I hope we get to do it again sometime. I would really like to go with all of our family and set-up a compound of tents on an isolated part of the beach. We would have a ton of fun! Maybe in 2010?