Layla and I went to the beach today. Holy hell.
In specific, we went to Ocean Shores, which is about 120 miles from Seattle. The drive took around 2.5 hours, although mappoint.msn and maps.google disagreed on the driving time by 3.5 hours. Google must assume you're slow, or old.
Here's what we found.
Well, we actually got lost and ended up on a beach inside the bay near Ocean Shores. All this deadwood was presumably washed up from the nearby logging mills, and was assembled by some beachbound transient as a sortof deadwood beachcomber shanty. Right after I took this picture, one lady posed on the deadwood and another started shooting pictures. Heh.
This place was kindof depressing, though. Here's another picture, because I know you love pictures.
After hitting Death Beach (as I'd like to call it), we went back to the town near the beach and searched for lunch. It took us three tries, but we finally found someplace that wasn't too mass-market and which served digestable food. The place we ended up (Mike's Seafood Market and Restaraunt? I forget.) was awesome, and I have no pictures from there.
This is where the fun began. It turns out that Ocean Shores becomes the center of some sort of lemminglike migration occuring yearly at around the 4th of July. Or maybe the entire summer. Whatever. The point was that this town was designed to accomodate a relatively small, fixed number of people for 95% of the year, and barely tolerate the mass flux of idiots during the holidays.
Traffic was pretty damned bad. For a town that had easily 5,000 extra people in it during the weekend, I was surprised to find that there was not a single damned stoplight. In fact, many intersections were these sortof four-way-stop tangles of cars as people tried to cross from two sets of divided four-lane roads across a roundabout-looking circle painted in feeble yellow on the center. The distance made it all impossible to navigate.
Thankfully, we eventually found the beach, and I was surprised to find that it too was fucking swarmed. Behold.
What you can't see here is that there are probably four rows of cars parked right next to each other, and stretching for at least a mile down the beach.
It turns out that the drive between Seattle and Ocean Shores looks a lot like northern New Mexico. Additionally, the town of Aberdeen, WA is largely indistinguishable from Roswell. It's uncanny, to the point that Layla and I made the observation nearly simultaneously. Trust me, the town is just that depressing.
We also stopped in Olympia on the way back, which is better known as The City Where I Have To Mail My Fucking Car Title. Everything is supercentralized in Washington, and registering my car requires mailing the title. Obnoxious.
The interesting part is that Layla spotted a sign which she said read, "YMCA GIRLS WITHOUT LIMBS SUMMER CAMP." I turned the car around and we took a picture of what the sign actually said, with the promise that I would include it in my post about today. Hereyougo.
I suppose I could tell you about all the little mundane details of the day (weather, smells, etc.), but I'm out of energy and I'm sure you'd rather be looking at porn anyway. So, to close out, I'm going to post a picture of a car which I spotted in Olympia because it looks nearly identical to my first car—a 1972 Dodge Dart.
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