South Carlsbad State Beach - 2014

It's become a bit of a tradition to try to spend a week of our summer at South Carlsbad State Beach.  For the second year in a row, we elected to spring for a delivered trailer, rather than "roughing it" in the van.  It adds some cost, but it's less than the price of the hotel rooms on the other side of the main road, and we've got a better view of the beach!

Having a bit of extra room to move around makes everything much more tolerable after the fourth day or so.  Packing into the van works fine for short trips or when we're moving a lot, but for a week in one place, it would get to be a grind.  On our last day, I also received the best compliment ever.  A woman was admiring the van, and comparing it to some of the huge lifted trucks nearby.  She has given me my new tag line:  "My minivan is cooler than your bro-truck!"

There are a few companies licensed to drop off the trailers.  They handle everything from leveling, to making sure the propane tanks are full, and the waste tanks are empty.  The only negative of these trailers is that they don't have solar, so you have to run the gasoline generator for an hour or so each day to top off the (meager) house batteries.  We were very conservative with our usage (minimal lights in the evening, etc. and the fridge runs on propane), and still needed to run the noisy gen-set more than I'd like.

This was the first trip with my freshly built chuckbox.  It's based on an aluminum tool box from Amazon.com, laid on its side with dividers made from tempered hardboard riveted into place with some thin aluminum angle stock.  Worked pretty well.  I wish I had the room to store my stove inside as well, but any bigger on the dimensions and it wouldn't fit under our bed platform in the van.  This is actually somewhat less compact than the kitchen kit I used last year, but it carries more stuff, and more importantly that stuff is somewhat more readily accessible.  The massive amount of nesting in the old kit is great for space efficiency, but makes it a multi-step process just to fetch a prep bowl!

 

We're always  careful with making sure Annika gets slathered in SPF75.  Unfortunately, nobody thought to double check that Kimberley was similarly cared for.  This was Day 1, so poor Kimberley had a rough few nights in the trailer.

In the end, though, this smile was what it was all about.  Other than several more spectacular sunsets, I didn't take too many pictures on this trip.  We played on the beach, I read two books.  We relaxed, and had a blast.