Bandon

So on Thursday, the 2nd, after we were finished with Clark's preschool graduation and then going back to his school later in the afternoon to have root beer floats with and meet his new Kindergarten teacher for next year, we took off for the beach.

We decided since the school year was almost finished for Daddy as well, he could afford a day or two away from his classroom for one weekend, so we headed west to Bandon.

We arrived at about 4pm and definitely weren't hungry, so we headed to the beach first. Plus it was beautiful weather, a little windy, but sunny, so we figured we better get some sand time in before the forcasted rain arrived the next day.

 The boys dug right in as soon as we picked a spot, but the boys were at a perfect level to catch a constant face full of sand courtesy of the wind. Brian and I tried to stand as wind barriers for a while, but that is not an easy task as so Brian went exploring for a better location.

He found this perfect little "fort" someone had started making from all the drift wood, so we moved the boys inside the area and found that it was a great little sand box completely protected from the wind!

 A view from above of our little sand box. It really was the perfect find and we spend a good 3 hours at the beach that first night.

 About 7pm we figured we should go cook some dinner, so we headed back to the yurt we rented to roast some hot dogs followed by some smores.

Here's the yurt we stayed in:

 And a look inside:

The boys actually both slept pretty well. Took Clark a while to get to sleep with new noises around, but he enjoyed sleeping on the top bunk. Logan got the futon to himself and only woke up once a little unsure of where he was.

Here are the boys eating breakfast the next morning.

 After breakfast we of course headed straight back to the beach. We lucked out and the weather was looking to be another beautiful sunny day and all these two boys wanted to do was play in the big sand box some more.

We got back to the beach and staked out our favorite little spot with the protective fort around it. The nice thing was the wind was actually pretty calm this day, so we ventured out of the haven more, but still enjoyed having the protection as well when it was needed. We spend about 7 hours at the beach that day with a short break around lunch to go back to the yurt for lunch and to back the car before check out time from the camp, then it was straight back for some more digging.

Our day was full of so much fun, so here are a lot of fun pictures from the day: 

Lots of digging and filling dump trucks and buckets by everyone.

And Dad taught the boys to fun of digging really deep holes and getting "buried" in them.

Logan stuck in the sand

and then the boys managed a hole big enough to get Dad's feet trapped in.

 Then finally Clark decided it was fun and went in for his turn:

 which he thought was absolutely hilarious, especially when Dad told him to dig himself out

 yes we eventually helped him out, but he sure enjoyed the challenge for a while.

We built sand castles

Dad and Clark spent lots of time running

and digging in the small waves

 Brian and I had fun creating lots of foot print creation in the really wet sand

And Brian had a little too much fun chasing waves and got a little more wet then expected, so then once he was wet he just didn't care and had a great time getting SOAKED after that.

Definitely needed to dig out a change of clothes once we were done for this one:

And as you can see from the rest below, we all had a great time and ran off lots of energy

Finally about dinner it was time to call it quits. (Even the boys were finally getting pretty tired that they were ready to be done as well.) So we trekked back to the car changed the boys and dug out dry clothes for Brian and tried to leave as much sand at the beach as possible.

Then we headed into Bandon and checked out the local candy factory before finding a really cute pizza and pasta restaurant that worked perfect for out respective requests of pizza and spaghetti & meatballs from our two hungry boys. We had a great dinner and some ice cream and then got in the car to head home. Clark was asleep within 20 minutes and Logan was close behind.

It was a great little family trip and well deserved after living through the crazy schedule of this last school year. We'll definitely be heading back to Bandon again and maybe next time we'll see more then just the beach, but I can't promise that since that beach won this family over as a favorite!