Ocean Shores

I was born to be frugal - to can my own jam and buy off brand groceries, to eat leftovers and wear clothes until they wear out, to wash and reuse ziploc bags.  Because of this, and other things, our little family doesn't get away much.  It costs money to travel, after all, and we need to be saving for the other things we want to do - like fly home for vacations and build up some down-payment seed money.  We have the privilege of being able to think about weekend getaways, but we mostly just don't have the will.  Mostly.  There was this evening when we thought we'd try to make it out to a cute little mountain town called Leavenworth.  We spent hours trying to plan and to find the cheapest hotel.  We ended up spending the weekend at home playing Ticket to Ride. 

Yet on Friday morning, all the fates aligned, and we set out for Ocean Shores, Washington.  It was a glorious 36 hours.  For one, nothing soothes me like the open road, but it's even better when the open road takes me to an open place.  Like the Flint Hills.  The Pacific Ocean is good too, though: goodbye tall evergreens and snow-capped mountains and hello empty horizon, big sky, wide space.

The surf breaks there, kind of like the wind in Kansas - the wind that makes it's own noise.  It's deeper - has more layers than the spirit of wind, and I think scarier too when it crashes onto the jetty, spraying water and then sucking back into itself revealing currents and patterns predictable only to its own body. 

I felt my spirit open with the landscape as I jogged along the beach and watched the sunset and conversed with one friendly local man about where and when to go beach combing.  In case you're ever there, try Damon Point about an hour before the tide begins to come in.  The local interpretive center (free, by the way), has fascinating information about shipwrecks and the timber industry and less information (as we might expect) about the profound loss of space and livelihood when the area was settled by white people.  Our room - winter rates really help on the hotel front - had a nice partial view of the ocean, grassy sand dunes and all.  Also for your personal travel guide, the shrimp basket at Mike's Seafood beats the one at Alec's By the Sea both in price, quantity, and taste.

We've been back a couple days now, back to the glorious lives of ministers.  I won't speak for Jamie, but for me, that means caring too much, struggling to celebrate the small successes, wrestling with questions about the future, wondering how/whether to fit in and/or challenge a church culture, looking for spaces of peace.  It's good in that challenging, growing pains way.  It's exhausting and confining too.

Is it too escapist to wish I were back in Ocean Shores?