Nehalem Bay Weekend
It’s been a while since we posted :/
This past weekend we went camping at Nehalem Bay State Park on the coast. The purpose of going there was to participate in a beach clean-up. Turns out…Nehalem Beach is the cleanest beach EVER! Justin and I walked for quite a while, mostly in the pouring rain, looking for garbage and this is all we found: …a couple dozen bitty bits of blue plastic, a fishing hook and a couple other little things.
We found ourselves getting disappointed that the beautiful shells and drift wood weren’t pieces of garbage 
Bad news; we didn’t pick up much garbage and were pretty cold…Good news; the beach was clean!
The weather was pretty sporadic throughout the weekend but gave us a great blue skied afternoon on Saturday which was nice. The wind was pretty crazy though the whole time we were there. In the middle of the night our “luxury tent” was swaying around so much I thought it was going to take off! While on the beach the wind brought a constant hail of sand so if you didn’t turn your back to the wind you would get a mouth full of sand. Luckily, the only casualties were two split “sun shelter” poles and I already fixed them to good as new 
Rockaway Beach Kite Festival
As we explored the Oregon coast this past weekend, we noticed some large objects flying in the sky. Having just come from the McMinnville UFO Festival we initially thought aliens were coming to abduct us.. but, as it turned out (probably for the better), it was actually a kite festival!
The best part of the festival was the professional kite flying performances. Now you’re probably thinking the same thing I was thinking— professional kite flying?? I thought kites were for kids. I mean, don’t you just sit there and hold a string? In fact, because I thought kites were so boring, I just recently gave a kite I had for years and never flew to Beka. Well, let me tell you, these guys were pros. The best performances were by Team iQuad, which includes John Baressi, a Portlander who is now my kite hero.
They fly these kites like Tom Cruise flies jets in Top Gun (or in real life, take your pick). They made the kites dance, fly, soar, and spin. They made me laugh, they made me cry. Sarah put her hand out, and Baressi landed his kite on her finger tip, from 100ft away, and balanced it there. Incredible! Needless to say, seeing this excited me enough to open my wallet and immediately buy a kite (this was an even better impulse buy than the time that a magician at Universal Studios sold me a flaming wallet).
Now I hadn’t previously thought of kites as expensive pieces of equipment, but now that I see how expensive they can be, how many accessories are sold for them, and all the high tech materials that go in to them (can you say ‘carbon fiber’??) I’m all the more excited! I purchased a starter kite from a nice women named Theresa who operates a kite shop in Vancouver. Now this kite is nothing as fancy as those four-string kites that the pros were flying, but for $50 it has been a heck of a lot of fun. There’s a park in Portland called West Delta Park that Theresa pointed me towards, and I have been practicing in the park. Those of you who will see me in the Dominican Republic tomorrow, prepare to be blown away by my kiting skills!
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