Weekend Recap - Beach Camping and Letterboxes

Jason Tucker

Aug 31, 2004 — 8 min read

Friday –

I took today off from work and we woke up early to go to the Norwalk Registrars office to get our marriage license. We got there and filled out the appropriate form and then paid the $70 for the license. They told us to go in the “back waiting room” and wait an hour so they can prepare our license. We went and waited and they had this TV all DMV style that displayed the number on your receipt so they can swear you in or what have you. I looked at the number being displayed and it sad 4.5 or something like that we were number 6 and I said “ah shit, they arnt even doing full numbers.. 4.5 umm thats like 4 and ½” well to my disbelief it was really “4,5” as if they were calling 2 numbers.. haha lame me. So we waiting.. waited.. People passed us by.. still nothing… waited some more, then a Mexican family came in all dressed up for their civil wedding. Even they went in before us.. and we weren’t even getting married today! So finally 1 hour passed and they were on “14,15,16” so I went to “the blue line” and waited.. Spoke to the lady and she said ‘oh, you ready, where’s you wife to be?” Jen arrives and we finish up the paper work. Congrats, fill this out when your married and send it in..

We go home and pack up the car, and head out to the beach and meet up with the fam. I drove and it took quite some time to get out here, I’m still getting use to this whole driving thing. The campsite was out in Carlsbad and it took about 1.5 hours to finally get out here. We arrived and got to the camp site; same peeps as usual here, cousins, my bro and brandy, grandma, all the normal heads. Around dinner time I cooked up Carne Asada and we grubbed it up. Good stuff, I got to try out our new 20.00 grill that we plan to use at the football games for dinners. It worked out great, its propane driven and cooks pretty quick. It finally got dark and I busted out the laptop and showed the fam our engagement pictures. Then Jen, Brandy and I took a walk to the beach and hung out. We played a few rounds of Rummy O and then headed to bed. Jen and I took a shower and then later headed to bed. Welp, I’m out.. peace.

Saturday –

8:59am – Woke up at 7:45 and the camp was just beginning to become active, family members waking up and the art of coffee dispension began. Me? I like my mornings el natural so I just talked it up with my great uncle Skip about thermo dynamics and all sorts of other shit that my brain can barely process in the morning. Entropy was the topic of the morning, I can barely understand it but I fall short without examples. They started cooking eggs and bacon and people higher in the food chain got to eat first. See, I’ve learned to just let shit be and not try to jump the line. My uncle tries to dictate what we all do and questions “what? You don’t put butter on your toast before you put jam on it?” or my favorite “Boy lemme get you some Jam for that toast. Mother, bring me the jam, this boy needs his jam” yeah.. that’s my uncle for ya. Good ole’ Uncle Skip! Jen just reminded me that he yelled at her for taking a piece of bacon. Whatever she told him “Look, this is all im eating, that’s it..” he scoffed and didn’t say anything more. What’s funny about him is that he knows he isn’t in charge, but the women appease him and just follow along when he has a decent idea.

Welp, I’m in the tent being anti social, I gotta get back out there.

5:03PM – Today’s been nice, good weather, the fam has been nice and alls been a decent day. My cousin sherry was having some issues with her Mac, her damn SSL wasn’t working in her browser, ends up her battery in the laptop was crapping out and not saving the date, kept coming up as Jan 1st 1970 or something, I fixed that up and now ssl will work again (damn lock in the browser). I fixed all that over at Starbucks over a Java Chip Crapachino. Ends up her battery on the laptop is dieing, it’s a known issue on this model of mac powerbooks. Later we went back and hung out at the campsite, Sherry and I vented with each other in her car. Her fam is doing some goofy shit and well, mines doing wacky shit too so we talked it out and had a few good laughs. Now Brandon is cooking up his “Moms not so famous Tacos” and some of the family is trippin out that he’s even cooking! Brandy and Jen took off to the store for smokes, apple schmirenoff ice and some other stuff too. Hopefully we have a decent camp fire, that’s one of my fave things to do here at camp.

I’m off to go check on Brandon, see ya.

11:32pm – More people arrived at camp, my cousin Justin and his girlfriend arrived and a few more of my uncle skips friends came too. Brandon was dieing to make his tacos so the fam was beginning to get hungry. I headed to the store for ground beef, Lawerys Seasoning Salt and some tortillas. Then I get a phone call while I was loading the car after shopping, its Jen and the rangers are ticketing our car, and threating to tow it or something. She’s in a panic so I told her to hang tight and I headed over there. I’m not one to get pissed off, but shit, we paid $20 for 2 nights worth of parking, they better be to blame here. I got to camp and the “park hosts” were there in their lil 4 seater electric car. I got out and talked to them and they said there was some mistake.. uhh yeah, your mistaken that were not suppose to be parking here. So I grabbed the ticket off of our window and got our stub that they taped to our window with the spot number on it and went and wrote down the cars license plate number on it. I went over and said “see, says 20 bucks, we paid it, so I’m not sure what you guys are here for.” The host says “That’s fine, see were just doing our job, and well, unfortunately were not rangers but just the hosts of the camp, you’ll need to speak with the rangers.” So Sherry and I hop in her car and head down to the ranger’s lil station thingy to tell them what’s up. Ends up yep, they are at fault and that yes, we did pay 20 bucks and we have until 12:00 noon non sunday to be here. After that is $10 more or we can park for free in the day parking at the end of the camp. We headed back and Brandon began making tacos for the whole camp. Well he petered out and left it up to me to cook the majority of the tacos. I finished the 36 taco shells in the pack and did another 10 or 15 more. Man people were eating them as fast as I can cook them. Uncle skip bitched about we fried them shut and it was “such a pain in the ass” to open them carefully and fill them with lettuce and tomatoes and “el pa-te-oh” sauce. Now mind you were talking OG germans here, back from the old ways of doing shit, and he’s telling me I’m not cooking tacos right? When I got some `crout issues around Oktober fest I’ll call these guys up. Whatever.. hehe, he ate them any how. After cooking all that mess I started up the BBQ and cooked up 4 hamburger patties for myself and the girls. Good stuff, man was I the cooking guy today.. I tell ya, a few oil burns here and a shit load of smoke from the bbq and man was I pooped. We ended the night with the girls paying Rummy-O and I went and kicked it next to the camp fire drinking Apple Twist Schmerenoff Ice’s. Man that’s some good stuff! Now I’m kicking it in the tent with my bro snoring in the other ‘room’ and some lil cousin of mine in the next tent snoring as well. Jen’s crashed out finally and all’s finally quite except for me pounding this out on the keyboard. See ya in the AM.

Sunday –

Jen printed out a bunch of letterboxes for us to do while we were doing here. If your new to letterboxing you should check out their site: http://www.letterboxing.org. We ate breakfast and then Brandy, Jen and I headed out to go look for the first letterbox.

We went and did the “Batiquitos Lagoon” [Pics] Letterbox.
http://www.letterboxing.org/BoxView.asp?boxnum=6504&boxname=Batiquitos_Lagoon

It was at a Lagoon about oh, 2 miles from camp. We had to do some hiking and well, the girls didn’t wear proper shoes, they had sandals on. We found the letterbox pretty quick and we stamped their booklet with our “Tucker” stamp and then stamped our clue page with their stamp. We took a few pics and then headed out to the next letterbox down in Torrey Pines area.

Torrey Pines State Reserve [Pics]
http://www.geocities.com/sileagle1/CA/SDsails/
We drove to the Torrey Pines State Reserve and paid 6 bucks, drove up the hill and then parked. We walked the trail and found the areas the clues talked about and then found the letterbox. Stamp stamp and we took a few pics of the awesome view and headed out to the Gliderport letterbox.

Gliderport Microbox [Pics]

http://www.letterboxing.org/BoxView.asp?boxnum=9969&boxname=Gliderport_Microbox
Glideport wasn’t that far from where were at anyhow. 10 minute drive and we were there. I took a few pics of the area and did some videos of the guys flying about with their gliders. The letterbox was hidden under an agave bush next to the main office. We found it and then headed off to the UCSD Series letterbox.

UCSD Series [Pics]

http://www.letterboxing.org/BoxView.asp?boxnum=9970&boxname=UCSD_Series
this place had 3 letterboxes, we only found 2 of them, one was at the Snake path and the other was at the Silent Tree. The 3rd at the Sun God we couldn’t find for some reason. It must have been picked up by mistake.

After that we headed back to camp and kicked it. Had a good dinner (my cousin owns a Mexican restaurant and brings food on every trip) and got to talk to more family members. It was cool to be the one getting married and to have them see us before our big day. Camping is totally in my element and I have a feeling that the wedding stuff is going to be pretty rough and Jen and I both. I’m glad we got to take the time to go out and have fun, and have a few adventures with Letterboxing.

We left camp a lil late, and headed home. The I-5 sucked, so I took a roundabout way to get home (I-5 to Palamino Airport Road to 15 FWY to the 91 and back on the I-5 way up near our house.) All in all it was a good trip and I’m glad we got to go.