W and I spent the weekend at Jalama Beach, camping out with his troop. It’s the year-end “relaxed” campout with no hikes, sign-offs, or other planned activities (mostly). The state beach has restrooms, a restaurant, a convenience store, and showers. All that’s required is to show up, set up your tent, and relax for the weekend. Only two other people from W’s patrol showed up, but we were joined by a sole member of another patrol and his dad late Saturday afternoon. (W and I had driven up Friday night, and our patrolmates had driven up with another group as well.)
For both Friday and Saturday night, the winds were horrible, distorting our tent so much that by the second night I had to tie one of the rainfly tie-downs to a heavy rock. Sand got into our tent both nights.
We did have a planned dessert contest, wherein each patrol had to cook a dessert for Saturday dinner (and, presumably, dinner to go with it), and the scoutmasters would judge the best dessert. W and I had experimented with stove-cooked Pillsbury cinnamon rolls topped with banana slices cooked in a homemade maple syrup. The hard part was cooking the cinnamon rolls on a stove. An oven has much more uniform heat, and cooking on a stove could easily result in burning the bottom surface. The hard part, then, was to slowly at low heat, in a cast iron skillet with parchment paper, and constantly look for burning. W did it for well over an hour and got through two tubes of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. The other scouts applied the frosting, and then we set them aside. Then we cooked spaghetti for dinner. After dinner, W cooked up the banana and maple syrup topping.
I tasted the first cinnamon roll concoction, and I commented to our crew that “the bananas really make this.” Later, when the scoutmasters came by, one of them commented “the bananas really make this dessert.” And during the announcement of the winners, the other scoutmaster commented “the cinnamon rolls were cooked in a Dutch oven to perfection.” Okay, we didn’t use a Dutch oven, but since we had the only cinnamon roll dessert, it had to be us.
Unfortunately for us, the crew that cooked apple dumplings won. (Luckily for my pride, none of the cobblers cooked in Dutch ovens won. I had commented to one of our scouts that we wouldn’t be beaten by cobblers in Dutch ovens, because, although they’re a scout favorite, they’re too safe a choice. I thought we were much more creative.)
Also on Saturday, a dad brought us to some of the rock formations at the beach and showed us how we could take some of the easily-removed stone plates and crumble them to look for fossils. We found plenty, including one very good specimen of a fish fossil. I think I found bugs or plants.
Finally, we did eat twice at the restaurant, for Saturday breakfast and lunch.
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J had a joint birthday party with a school friend today, at an indoor go-kart racing place in Burbank. I joined in the dads race. Not all of the karts went the same speed, and I clearly had a slower car, by a bit. I was driving with the accelerator floored most of the time, and I never touched the brakes, but I got lapped at least once. Really, I was driving so hard my tires were squealing around the corners.
One thing that bothered me was how tight the steering was. My arms are still sore from driving around those S-curves and the main hairpin turn.
The third photo above is of me.