BODEGA BAY CAMPING AND CRABBING

with friends the Javadis and the Michauds

Bodega Bay is about an hour north of our home in Sausalito. After a typical Friday afternoon commute up Highway 101, my friend Shari and I arrived with our kids in the dark around 5pm at our campsite at Doran Beach. Our friend Cyrus was there already with his brood and helped us get up our tents; Mick left school at five with Shari's husband Richard, conveniently arriving around 8 after the work had been done.*

After tinfoil dinners, roasted marshmallows, and dutch-oven- on-a-campfire peach cobbler (our friend Annie's from Idaho and swears that camping is all about the food), Dane and Aubrey had tired themselves out climbing the trees with the Javadi girls and quickly fell asleep in our two-man tent.

Our two-man tent, a brutal-weather shelter from REI (I'm sure it has a more accurately descriptive name for it), was a terrific purchase Mick made at an REI garage sale last year. The tent retails at well over $300--Mick snatched it up for $5. It was missing a pole, which we replaced with the poles of our other (inferior) two-man tent. Upon packing up for the trip, though, we forgot that we usually have the luxury of borrowing Mike and Jan's six-person tent for outings like this. Consequently, the kids and I slept in the two-man tent together (maybe I slept four hours? but, hey, camping's not really about a good sleep, is it?) next to the tent-mansions of our friends (do tents really need two "rooms"?) and Mick slept solo in the Vanagon. (Of course, you can guess who got the best deal there!)

Woke at 6am to the sound of ocean waves beating against the shore, which we'd been hearing off and on all night drifting in and out of sleep. Ate breakfast, packed up, and went crabbing.

Crabbing was, let's see... educational. We had to get the two kids out on a rocky, precarious jetty, tie chicken meat and big rocks up in onion bags, secure ropes around the tops of the bags, and throw the bags down into the water for crabs to decide to cling to (evidently we could've used pet food too). It was sketchy out on the jetty (and chilly) and far from shore, and even though it was a real adventure, we headed back to the beach after an hour and set off toward home so Mick could study the rest of the weekend. Evidently, after several more families arrived, some crabs were caught and cooked, but there was just enough for each person to have a taste. Nobody in the Reynolds van even breathed a word about salty, succulent, melt-in-your-mouth crabmeat the entire way home. We'll be better prepared next time (and maybe we'll just show up to do it in the morning).


*For the record, being married (with kids) to a dental student means stuff like this always happens. I shopped for, packed up, hauled down (three flights), drove, hauled in, set up, fed, sang to sleep, etc., etc., in order for this twelve hour event to happen! Kindly enough, though, Aubrey had stood in the doorway earlier that morning and said, "Mom, how can I help? You shouldn't have to do that alone."