*First Trip to the Ocean*
By: enok45
29 September 2007

When I was around ten years old my father decided to take the family on a vacation over to the coast. Since I had been born and raised in Spokane all my life I had never seen the ocean so I was really looking forward to this. Well the time had come my father had borrowed my grandfathers motor home, we had it all loaded up and the five of us were ready to go.

We jumped on the freeway and headed off towards Seattle 350 miles away. We were actually going to a campground called Kalaloch right on the ocean. when we arrived it was evening time have some dinner and go out to see if I could make some friends for the week we were going to be there. Well right away I met a kid about my age, we threw the football for a while and made plans to meet 1st thing in the morning to go exploring. So off to bed we all went. The next morning after we all got up and had breakfast I met up with my newfound friend and we decided to go down to the ocean and see what we could find. So we just started walking up the beach it was so beautiful like something I had never seen before, most of the shoreline was typical a lot of sand to our right and a whole lot of water to our left.

Well after walking for about an hour we came to a huge rock that came out from the shoreline into the ocean so we were going to have to wade out and get wet if we wanted to get around it, no problem for two energetic boys so that's exactly what we did. We got a bit wetter than we had planned on but we made it. So we kept going not worried about getting lost because there is only two directions a person could take and after all I live on the other side of the state where we have mountains and there is all kinds of ways one could get lost.

Well about two hours before dark we decided that it was time to start back, so we did. Now I don't know where my friend was from but where I come from the water doesn't just take it upon itself to rise and fall every 12 hours. Well needless to say when we got back to that big rock that we had waded around lets just put it this way[I don't think so!!!] I was an expert swimmer but was not going to attempt that. So I thought what we would do is backtrack a ways, hike up the hillside, and parallel the ocean on the way back to camp. When we got to the top I noticed some train tracks and remembered that I had seen them the night before in camp. So I thought all we had to do is follow them. Well that went fine until we came to the biggest canyon I had ever seen in my life and those tracks were going right over it. So we had some options, go back the way we came and wait for the tide to go down, try and hike around this canyon, or go across the rail road trestle. Well I decided that it probably wasnÕt the safest but it would be the quickest. So my friend and me took our shirts and coats off tied them around our waist, thinking if a train came we could tie off underneath of a railroad tie while the train passed overhead. We stepped out and started on our way, we would put our ear to the track often to listen for trains. When we got to the middle I realized just how far up we were. I remember dropping a rock in between two ties and watching it fall. Anyway when we made it to the other side it was dark and we were so relieved because we knew that if we kept following the tracks camp couldnÕt be that far away and it wasnÕt when we got back the camp fires were going and the food was on.


enok45



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