South Foggarty Creek

I honestly can't remember the sequence of events for this trip... only few weeks later. (Thank gawd for the photo order...)  In fact, I couldn't remember where-we'd-been -when, about half way through the trip.  It was, strangely, instantly, a mental blur of green and fog and rock and happiness.  

I just know that, eventually, we were far enough from anywhere that food got scarce (ok, ok, we're a bit picky.  Fast food (thought I don't even remember seeing any of that) doesn't count as edible in our car and our snobbery had us eating out of our poorly stocked back pack for quite a few meals.  The child was a real champ about this.)  At any rate, somewhere along 101 and nowhere was South Foggarty Creek, and we stopped there on a whim.   There seemed to be a deer trail (or something:) through the dense bushes beside a tiny pull-off, so we followed it, excitedly.  Emerging from our green squeeze, the child saw his ideal bit of happiness:  a quiet beach with rocks to climb.

It was still foggy, still chilly, and the beach was eerily empty (at least it seemed so, to those of us used to Coney Island's craziness).  We loved it.    

One of our favorite features of the west coast beaches:  the rivers.  Almost every beach we stopped at had a clear river flowing though the sand into the surf.  Which is so freakin perfect for a kid to play in (when the waves are really roaring) that its just silly.  This was P's first river beach and he was enchanted by the river rocks and their possibilities.

Then he noticed that E had scaled the mini mountain and decided to cross the stream to follow suit.  The budding geologist was tickled to feel volcanic rock under his climbing toes.

The top had a few tiny tidal pools, something P had been determined to find while west, so he was infinitely satisfied at this point.  Between the tiny, overgrown hike, the fog wrapping around us and the ocean's wild roar pinning us to our private mountain, we (again ;) felt like wild west explorers.  If our first family trip wasn't enough, this sort of setting was the stuff solidarity is made of....