We all spent 4 nights camping down at Carlsbad State Beach last week. It’s our annual camping trip that we’ve been doing since I’ve known Melanie, and she’s been going there even longer. Although we did have a fun time, there were a few issues that made this year’s trip stand out from previous ones.
On Tuesday morning, the first morning we were there, Lauren went on a bike ride with Allie, Jake, Rene, Dale and Rhonda. I stayed back at the camp to take a cat nap. Rhonda woke me up and said that Lauren had taken a bad spill on her bike and her knee was cut pretty badly.I jumped up and drove down to where they were. The cut on her knee was pretty bad, along with a nice scrape on her elbow and some road rash on the side of her thigh. Dale said that she didn’t even cry, and that she was a tough girl. I drove her down to the ranger station which had first aid service. They cleaned the wounds out and dressed them up with blue and green wrap… she got a kick out of that.
I was bummed that she couldn’t go into the water since I wanted to give her some surfing lessons. We still managed to have a good time playing on the beach.That night, we wanted to go out to eat and went to a place that was recommended to Dale. I’ll post separately on that incident since it deserves it’s own. Stay tuned for that one.
On Wednesday morning, I went for a surf. After about 30 minutes, I wanted to walk south as the slight current had taken me north a few hundred yards from where I paddled out. As I walked, I noticed a large dead seal on the beach. It looked as if it was washed ashore overnight during high tide. I looked up the bluffs and noticed our campsite was directly above. Once I inspected it for any shark bites, I paddled back out for another 30 minutes… the whole time keeping my eyes peeled for anything swimming near me.
Upon returning to our campsite I told everyone about the dead animal… and, of course, the kids all needed to climb up on the fence to see it. [better from way up on the bluff than up close like I did] When lunch-time rolled around, the stench of the rotting seal began to waft through our campsite every so often. It was not something you want to smell every 5 minutes or so. A park ranger was at the restroom area and I stopped and asked him what the procedure was for removing the carcass. He explained that the life guards take care of such things… but they have their hands full with an abandonded sailboat that was almost washed ashore. — We watched in amazement as a life guard swam out about 100 yards, hooked up a line to the front of a 20 ft sailboat and towed it out past 1000 yards… backstroking… by himself. Not sure why the boat was abandoned, they towed it away later. — We packed up our beach gear and headed down to the beach for the rest of the day.
Just after getting down to the beach, Allie was wading through the knee-deep water… and got several stings from a Jellyfish. It was painful stinging for about an hour, but a bag of ice helped the hurt and she was back to normal in no time.
The next morning the “disposal” company had arrived to remove the dead seal. Now that would be a nasty job… putting a dead seal into a 50 gallon barrell and trucking it away. We were moving to a different site anyway since we wanted to stay an extra night. Unfortunately, we couldn’t keep that site as it was already booked by someone else.
Quite an eventful camping trip… we certainly have not had such drama in previous years.
