Is there anything prettier?

While the view from Peaks is gorgeous in all different directions, I love watching the tide come in by the Cairn Beach and seeing the waves crash up. Also wonderful is the beach that's through the woods behind our house. Getting there requires a trek through poison ivy (which I am either immune to like my two sisters, or have managed to avoid thus far). During one amusing trip last summer to the beach to see the starfish pools we decided it would be best to get back to the house a different way rather than to risk going past poison ivy again. In the group was my mother and Tom, my uncle and aunt and their two children, and my older sister. Everything started off well with a little light bouldering and climbing, however we soon came to a spot that looked a little precarious, especially when you consider that two of the people in our group had much shorter legs and patience than the rest of us. My uncle and I started planning out a route to cut across a narrow ledge but our hand holds turned out to be full of broken glass. We managed to get all of us through with only minor casualties (a couple of pieces of glass in my hand and some in my cousins as well). From here it was a big jump down, luckily Tom is tall and was able to help us find ways to shimmy down or give us the reassurance that if we jumped there was a good chance he would catch us/break our fall.

It seemed like we had made it past most of the adventure when my cousin lost her flip flop down a crevasse. My mom and I were all set with leaving it since it was fifteen feet down in a narrow tunnel, but somehow my uncle managed to get down to the bottom of it, and throw it out. On we went, now all with shoes on and had a relaxing stroll across the beach before we came to a dock that would bring us back to the road the house was on. We were in the process of climbing up the side of the dock and half of us were on the beach and half were on the dock when we realized there was a hornet nest that we were disturbing with all our climbing and jostling. Those still on the beach climbed up very gingerly and then standing at the opposite end of the dock we sprinted up to the top and to the woods but were not quite fast enough. So in our efforts to avoid possible poison ivy, we encountered very real broken glass and irate hornets, and yet, we all fondly look back at that as one of the best parts of the trip!