Beach Blanket Bungle

​This is the story of a day at the beach that was no picnic.

We’ve been living within a mile of the beach for a few years now. I pointed out that we haven’t used our beach umbrella, still new in the package after… four years? We used to do a day trip at least once a year and lay out in the sand. Wouldn’t it be a nice way to spend the holiday?

I woke up at 9:30 and immediately realized that the sun was out. Finally, a break in the “June gloom” that is a regular feature of coastal living. The previous day we’d been socked in with low, heavy clouds until nearly 5 pm.

Let’s go!

We had what sounded like a simple, straightforward plan. Let’s walk down, grab a quick breakfast, hang out all day, and then we can grill hotdogs with our backpacking stove.

What will we need?

Now, in my mind all of this came together quickly. We live in a tiny apartment with minimal possessions, right?

That part is true. The trouble comes in when it’s time to access the stuff we only use on special occasions.

The other obvious problem is for me to try to do anything before I’ve had breakfast.

Here are the beach towels and the picnic blanket and the sunblock. Here are the hotdogs and buns and beverages. Now, what else do we need?

The folding chairs

And the backpacking stove

And the propane canister

And some matches - do they still work?

And some condiments

And some kind of skewer for the hotdogs

And a backup battery and connector cables for our phones

All of which exist in separate locations!

Where is the backpacking stove? Why, it’s

In the backpacking tub

In the bottom of the closet

Underneath the sleeping bags because they don’t fit anywhere else

Under the little folding chairs

And, in fact, underneath every single other item in the tub.

Wait, there are two of them, the one for Europe and the one for the US. Which one is which??

Now we have the stuff we need, except that the hallway is full of all the stuff that got pulled out of the gear closet, and we can’t leave until we put it away because we can’t physically open the front door.

Okay, about those skewers. Aren’t they in the utensil drawer?? No?

Maybe they’re

In the top of the kitchen cabinet with the extra cutlery and serving utensils. No?

Maybe they’re

In the top of the cabinet above the fridge, with the… baking supplies. Nope. I guess we must have gotten rid of them when we had that yard sale three moves ago.

Guess we’ll use a fork then.

By the time we were packed and ready to leave, we had been banging around for nearly an hour

Still no breakfast and not even any tea

So we went down to the basement with our three bags and retrieved the beach umbrella

And marched down the hill to the cafe

Where the line was very long

And the restroom was, of course, closed.

We had a perfectly fine breakfast and walked another five minutes to the beach

Which was already quite packed

But we found a nice spot and it was fine. What looks like mayhem in photos is really a bunch of people placed ten or twenty feet apart, facing into a bracing wind of 15-20 mph blowing perpendicular off the sea all day long.

What do you do when you go to the beach?

We people-watch and enjoy other people’s music and try to read and talk about random stuff.

There was a little girl digging a hole all day long, and finally she was shoulder-deep and I thought, she’ll run her own company one day, she’s just like me, even on a holiday she doesn’t know what “relax and enjoy yourself” means other than to come up with a really challenging project.

She got her little brother and made him stand in the hole, and she and her baby sister and their mother took turns kicking sand down in the hole to bury him. He wore a patient, somewhat dejected expression; he’d been here before.
​
Something similar was happening to my hubby

Because his chair legs kept punching down into the sand, forcing him to lean back like he was in a dental chair

And we understood that backpacking chairs are not the same as beach chairs, because those have horizontal rods for legs

So I added them to my checklist

Along with ‘hand soap’ and ‘extra TP’ because the public restrooms had run out by 3 pm.

After a few hours of hanging out on the beach, we decided it was time to grill our hotdogs

Making us the envy of everyone nearby, none of whom had thought of this, because they do not have our elite backpacking skills

Or equipment

And they didn’t notice how long it took us to remember how to snap together the cunning little imported Japanese folding table

Or light the stove in the bracing wind

Despite the folding metal windscreen

And they probably weren’t there for the part where we got an object lesson in heat transfer

And had to set the fork down for a while before roasting the last hotdog because ow

But the hotdogs were exactly what we were hoping for, and we felt really smart.

Finally it was time to head home

Packing up all our gear that was more or less covered in sand and mustard

And it turned out one of us had popped a hole in my nice picnic blanket from the inappropriate chair legs

And I got a pretty bad sunburn because I have never developed basic competency with sunblock.

We have another outing planned

Our first camping trip together in years

So it’s probably time to take some notes and write up a checklist

And maybe pack our gear the day before we’re supposed to leave

And take a photo of my sunburn to remind myself

Winging it is never quite as good as spending a little extra time preparing.