A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

I'd hoped to sleep in the next morning, but no such luck. It had rained most of the night—I love sleeping in a tent or motor home while it's raining, but the sound had roused me and now John was up and ready to move. He parked the unit by the bathrooms with the intention of our taking showers there. However, the shower stalls wanted quarters. So he pulled to the camp's dump station and drove back and forth between the sewer and the fresh water while each of us bathed.

(One "regular" shower, that is, running the water for the entire procedure, fills the "grey water" tank. One "Navy" shower, where you wet yourself, turn the water off, soap yourself, then turn the water back on to rinse, fills about a third of the tank—but isn't as satisfying.)

The rain slowed and it looked like the weather might clear. John, Karen and Mary wanted to go to Newport Beach. They had once lived in Huntington Beach, one town up the coast from there, and thought Newport Beach was just the nicest beach there is. That was another ninety miles. When we got there, the rain had stopped but it was still cool and the sky was overcast. Parking was a challenge; none of the parking lots we could find there could accommodate a thirty-foot motor home. I finally found two adjacent parking spaces I could fit into, on the street. We pooled all our quarters for the meters and found we could stay there for one hour and fifteen minutes.

Still, Newport beach was nice. John explained they had machines that combed it each night, picking up the trash and leaving only clean sand. Zachary took his boogey board into the water and tried to ride a wave in, then waded out with Michael and me, running back and forth into the water.