The Stillness of the Beach at Night

Here we are on vacation at the Eld House. S is sleeping, and since I took a nap earlier, I'm wide awake and raring to go.

This vacation thing is nice. Never before have we really gone on vacation. I don't count family obligations as vacations. Before Julia we could pretty much do what we wanted when we wanted, aside from our work schedule. And even then, we could take off time from work whenever we felt like it. But after a year of Julia, it's nice to take a few days off from parent responsibilities. She's far less difficult now, but when she's awake, it seems like we try to feed her a bottle or a meal every hour or so. Then at night she still tends to wake up once or twice. So yeah, getting out of parent responsibilities for 48 hours is really, really nice.

We're down in Olympia at a bed and breakfast. It's a guest house that's on Puget Sound. It's really pretty here. We brought our camera, but we didn't change batteries beforehand, and it's dead. We forgot spare batteries. Oh well, we have our iPhones. And those have cameras. That should be good enough.

Today we took a kayaking trip on Puget Sound. It is soooo nice here. Expansive waters, nature, peace, just beautiful all around. I cheated on my non-gluten/dairy diet when we went to Applebee's. I challenge you to find something on that menu I could eat. Even a salad is out because I can't have dressing (soybean oil) or cheese or a breadstick. And, seriously, what is salad without dressing, cheesing, and the requisite breadstick???

This evening we went geocaching. We set out around 8:30pm. When we headed back, we kind of realized that there isn't a lot of lighting around here. At all. I guess there's a downside to all this peace: pitch black darkness. We had walked a mile and a half away (three miles total), and I was spooked on our way back. I don't usually spook easily, so that's saying something.

It's kind of quirky around here. There are large parcels of land, and it seems like a lot of people have a business-like spirit around here. Imagine houses with businesses attached all over the place. We're staying at a bed & breakfast that is the guest house of a main house. Then up the road is a house that uses its spare space to rent out RV storage. Then there's the people who used the rest of their land as a driving range. You can't forget about Steamboat Annie's. It's a little shack that serves a bazillion different food items with a house attached. Then there's the really bizarre place. I'll have to take a picture of it. It's a house, and they also sell used kiddie plastic crap: Little Tykes cars, sandboxes, plastic slides. It's like a junkyard full of plastic toys. Never saw anything like it before.

S and I really like this living on the water thing. Both of us want to do it. I think we live in the suburbs because the alternatives don't look terribly promising. Urban living is not really for us - too crowded and noisy. The country isn't really our style either; yardwork and tending to animals have no appeal. Apartments, condos and townhomes aren't really "us" either. By default, we're in the suburbs. But living on the water does seem like us. Quiet, reserved, beautiful scenery, it's a nice way to unwind. I could seriously do it.

I even found a house for sale very close to the water that looks great. Of course, it's an hour away from where we live now. It's so stupid because we both have very small commutes to our jobs right now, and moving to a house on Puget Sound would easily make our commutes an hour each way. And uprooting Julia would be difficult.

But...we could always take a look at the house just to see what's out there. And we could also look at houses on a lake near where we live now. It's a great time to buy real estate....