Guess where I went today?

What do you do when you inherit an extra kid for a while?

You drag him and the rest of the kids to the beach and make them pose for endless pictures while squinting into the sun!

One of the really terrific things about where we live is that the nearest beach is an hour away. This is Fort Stevens, Oregon--just west of Astoria. It is historically significant, being part of the Lewis and Clark trail, and it has this great old shipwreck on the beach. It's the wreck of the Peter Iredale which ran aground in 1906.

It's also where the only attack on the mainland US was made during WWII. A Japanese sub came up and lobbed some shells right over the wreck.

James' friend Clark moved out of the neighborhood over a year ago. He lives up north of Wenatchee in the part of Washington where they grow the apples the state is famous for. It's about 5 hours away, so we don't get to see him very often, and it's nice to have him for a couple of days--but the hours of video games were making me nuts. So we went to the beach, and it was great.

We made the biggest and best sandcastle we've ever made. We also saw a flock of almost NINETY brown pelicans. And on the way home we saw the tiniest fawns I've ever seen grazing by the side of the road with their mama (though I couldn't figure out how to get a picture without obstructing traffic.)

It was a perfect sort of day.