Henry Cowell Camping - Day One

Friday afternoon we headed off for Henry Cowell State Park for the weekend. This is an interesting campground a few miles outside of Santa Cruz in a heavily tree infested area.

There were three families that went: Nwad and her two girls Ylime and Aynos, Nod (not Nwad - which caused lots of confusion throughout the trip) and his wife Htiaf, and us (Mrs Notthat, The Boy, and I).

Note: for most of these people these are not their real names.

Here The Boy is tormented by Aynos and Ylime. To be fair, this tormenting went both ways during the trip. A lot.

Since the campground is close to Santa Cruz, once the tents were set up we headed to the Boardwalk. Some chose to ride the upchuck machines.

And then there is the Log Ride (this has an obviously distressed Nod (not Nwad) riding in front, an excited Aynos in the middle, and a cool as a cucumber The Boy in the rear. They did get a bit wet in the end.


While the others did their best to damage their bodies on the rides (Mrs Notthat getting an award for inflicting the most pain on herself by choosing to ride in the last row of some stomach-churning ride or other), I decided to eat ethnic food. I started with a cajun corn dog, a Fosters beer, and a sundae featuring French vanilla and English toffee frozen yogurt. (I could not work out an ethnic angle to a deep fried Twinkie or else that would have made the list too.)

But the main reason for going to the Boardwalk was for the free Friday night concert - this night featured the greaser doo-wop band Sha Na Na (who played at the original Woodstock, weirdly as the next to last act on the last day - they were followed by Jimi who burned his guitar in their honor). Here you can see them making us excercise.


A great tradition of these concerts are the beach balls that bounce around during the show. I bought a 50 cent ball for $2.99 in one of the shops and had all the kids write something on it.


Ylime wrote this bit about it hitting someone's head and The Boy added a graphic of sorts showing the result.


And then we set the ball free. We were able to follow it as it made its way several times across the crowd.


Fun bit - there is a fair amount of competition between the little kids to catch and then smack a beach ball at some random adult's head. There was a little girl not far from us that was trying very hard to get her hands on a ball, lunging at them even when they were twenty feet away. Then a ball ended up at The Boy. The Boy gently tossed it to her and two things happened: the girl nearly wet herself she was so thrilled and about 30 people in the area started applauding The Boy's good deed. This was a very cool moment.

After the last song we packed up and headed back to camp, where a wonderful campfire entertained us for a bit before heading to bed.

As is the tradition when I go camping, it was impossible to sleep due to irritating things, such as a little kid that started crying at 12:30 AM for WAY longer than any decent adult would have allowed to happen, followed at 4:30 AM by some idiot Britsh guy talking on his cell phone to his boss in the UK (using his loudest outdoor voice just in case the boss could not hear him through the phone) who stated at least a dozen times "I don't mean to sound petty about this, but..." Here's a clue - if you think it might sound petty, it is. Even if you are not named Tom. (A bad play on words - sorry.)

That's it for the first day. The next post will cover day two in which we willfully destroy some money, wade in a creek, and eat a great dinner.

That's it - move along...