Arcadia Beach Roadie 2007
Over Labor Day Weekend, me and the old high school gang got together for a camping trip. While it was without a doubt the worst planned camping trip ever (especially for Labor Day Weekend), it actually turned out pretty well. We had no idea where we were going to stay but we headed out Friday night at about 8:00 for the coast. Without a place to lay our head, we drove up and down the 101 for 45 minutes in the dark of night, stopping wherever we thought we saw a possible campsite. Finally, around 11:00, we found our final destination.
"Camping Prohibited!" said the sign at the front of the beach, but we didn't care. We didn't really have much choice, really. We saw some cars in the parking lot and investigated a little further; indeed, at least 3 other groups had pitched tents on the beach. So we found a place that wasn't too intrusive and started hauling our stuff down the steps to the sand.
Saturday was a gorgeous day. Bright and sunny, but with a little breeze as well. It was one of the nicest days I've spent at the beach. I didn't leave the beach the entire time, except to go back to the car. I did a lot of reading, took a lot of pictures, and watched Heim almost kill himself. Oh yeah, Heim almost killed himself. He climbed up some pretty steep rocks and after he'd gotten about 30 feet off the ground, realized his footing was largely unstable. We realized it too, when we saw large rocks falling from the cliff and making a loud THUD! as they hit the wet sand below. Anyway, he eventually found a way back down, but it was a little tense for a while. He even drew quite a crowd, as you can see in the picture.
The next morning, we awoke to a loud voice, "You are in violation of Oregon State law. It is a $97 fine for camping on the beach. I'm giving you 30 minutes to pack up and leave, at which point I will start handing out citations. You are all banned from the beach for 48 hours." The ranger was pretty cool; he took all of our id information and then pretty much left us along while we packed up. It worked out for the best, really; I wanted to leave early and this gave everyone a reason to pack up as quickly as possible. We're all just glad he somehow missed us on Saturday morning.
In related news, if you'd like to see pictures of our trip, you can now do so here. Some of you may have noticed that the Pictures section is sort of working now. It's not pretty, but you can see all the pictures in my Picasa account, which is a pretty big accomplishment. There aren't any PHP tools available for the Picasa integration like there was for the Blogger integration, so it's ended up being an entirely different experience trying to make the pictures show up. While the style is nowhere near where it needs to be, the pictures are all there. I did a little home-brew API in PHP to handle all the XML parsing from Google's Atom feed. I'll go through what I did to set that up at a later time and post my code for download in case anyone wants it. I'm not taking the time to make it really robust, but if someone wants to add data that I leave out, they can easily add to it. Look for that in the next few weeks and look for the pictures section to be finished later this week.
