The Fourth

Alright, so although this is a bit late, I'm going to write about my weekend over the Fourth of July. It was the first time I'd had days off in about four weeks, and not only did I have one day off, I had three! It was so so exciting! So I got to go up to Whidbey with my family and my grandparents. And we had a wonderful time. The weather was good, cloudy in the mornings, but sunny and warming up nicely in the afternoons, especially on the Fourth, it was a very nice day. Which was surprising because the joke is always that the sun never comes out up here until the fifth of July. The best part about the weekend though were the tides. My grandparent's cabin sits on Cultis Bay, which is at the very South end of Whidbey Island. But because it's a bay, the tide goes out pretty far there normally, but when it's a minus four foot tide, there is sand for miles and miles! No one had ever seen tides that low before, it was absolutely incredible. On a minus three foot tide, we can walk out to the big rock, with the minus four, we were able to see rocks out beyond the big rock we'd never seen before! It was amazing. So we spent most of our time on the beach, since it was amazing. We saw a lot of critters, and ended up saving many that had been stranded. I won the "crab-saving contest," Kari won the "sea star-saving contest" Mommy won the "fish-saving contest." The cod was the most interesting adventure. My mom saw the seaweed a little ways away lift up, and then settle again, so she went to go see what it was that was under there. There was a rock cod, and not a small one either! He was over a foot long. So she picked him up, and we put him in the channel, because that's where the nearest water was, and he was kind of floating along. We weren't sure he was going to revive, because we didn't know how long he'd been out of water. But he was still alive. The bad part was that the channel was so shallow at this point because the tide was out so low, that he got stuck! So we dug a little channel just for our cod. It was an adventure. He was slowly reviving, so he wouldn't let us pick him up anymore, but he kept getting stuck. So we just kept digging a little trench, and eventually he made it out to the ocean. That was very exciting. We also saw many seagulls, herons, crabs of various varieties, and a sea pen, which I haven't seen in years. We found this very purple four-legged starfish. And squirted lots of clams, which was very fun, although I was not appreciative when they squirted up the leg of the shorts I was wearing. Better than Kari though, Mommy squirted a clam and it gave Kari a shower. That was highly amusing. We had a fabulous time on the beach, but we also had fun back at the cabin, with our annual croquet challenge, which we realized that whoever set up the course seemed to win. And our card games which are always a blast. It was so much fun! And so relaxing too. Although I had to leave really early Monday morning to get back to the Club to work, it was worth it. I love weekends that I have off!