I’m back! My lovely beach vacation is all but a memory, a slew of digital photos, and lingering woodsmoke scent in my hair (that is the WORST to get out, I’ll tell you). We enjoyed the above view from our ‘lil campsite, and got down and walked that beach pretty much every day.
There is a lack of strong walkers in the world, so once we got far enough, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. Lovely, just lovely. We ate well, too, with one huge cooler filled with delicious fruits and vegetables (Jeff commented the first night that some…OK, most…people out camping would be really upset if they opened their cooler and discovered it was full of fruits and veggies). That’s not all we ate, of course. Our daily eating looked something like this:
- Breakfast I: Coffee with milk, bowl of fruit (pineapple and various stone fruits) and nonfat Greek yogurt.
- Breakfast 2: Either scrambled eggs with vegetables (summer squash, potato, onion) and a few slices of bacon OR whole grain pancakes with an egg on the side and homemade preserves on top. More coffee.
- Lunch: Green salad with other veggies (roasted sliced beets, grated carrot), hummus, kalamata olives, or an apple with some raw almonds and a bit of sliced salami and cheddar cheese with whole grain crackers.
- Snacks: Fruit and nuts (usually, although Jeff did bring a few less healthy snacky foods, which I had a bit of ).
- Dinner: Grilled meat (steak, burgers, salmon, all-beef hot dogs from Whole Foods) and a salad or coleslaw and grilled vegetables. Plus Jeff’s amazing home-canned dill pickles. Did I say amazing? Amazing!
I had some beer and wine, but not a lot, as I find it makes me tired lately. And tired is bad when you’re hunkered down in front of a campfire and it gets dark and starts to get cold and you need to, like, you know, have the motivation to get up and go to bed. At least it wasn’t nearly as cold as the time we camped in Maine in September. Good grief! Just us, a few other hardy folk, and large gangs of marauding punk raccoons.
I pretty much ate what I wanted, since most of it was totally healthy, but I really watched my hunger levels and took the opportunity to be more intuitive about what and how much to eat, which is something I don’t do a lot of at home. The scale didn’t give me any surprises the morning after I got home, so I guess I did just fine! And that’s even with treats like s’mores and a stop for ice cream after we did a 7-mile hike (for us) and another couple of miles (for the dog, who wasn’t allowed on the other hike).
We didn’t get a chance to do the rainforest hikes I had hoped to do, partly because we were so enamored with our beach, and because one day we drove way up the coast to hike into and walk along Shi Shi beach…
…to the Point of the Arches (couldn’t get a good photo of the actual arches).
No dogs on Shi Shi, so Dug’s consolation hike was a nice little 1.5 miles to the northwesternmostpoint of the continental United States, Cape Flattery. He appreciated it, as did we. And then we took hot showers, which we appreciated even more! Dug didn’t care if we showered or not. He’s a dog.
So that’s that! I’m finishing up a few things for my summer class (my kitchen smelled like yeast yesterday…kind of nasty), and then I’m getting my house in order (literally and figuratively) before the new school year starts. I plan to do more real cooking, like from recipes and all, while I can, so hopefully that will garner some good stuff to share!
