Hiking in my Rainbows

(For those of you not familar with the name, Rainbows are flip-flops.) I went to the beach with my room mates on Saturday. The girls didn’t want to pay the 15000 for parking (a little less than $2 US), so we decided to find an alternate route. We have some friends who live nearby, so we drove up to their house. (Key word: up). Our friend said sure, he could guide us down to the beach. Being from the East Coast, my mental image of going to the beach consists of crossing a bridge, paying too much to park, and walking a few feet from my car across a paved, level road to the sand. I wasn’t expecting that of course, but I didn’t know what to expect. Why would we need a guide to the beach? We needed a guide to show us the small opening in the barbed wire fence that keeps the cows away from the house. Speaking of cows, we followed our friend down cow trails through the woods to a clear area and then down more cow trails through more woods (I’ll let you guess how I knew they were cow trails) until we came out of the trees to the ocean. I say ‘ocean’ rather than ‘beach’ on purpose because at this particular point, there wasn’t really a beach. The hill we had just come down dropped off abruptly, and in front of us were huge, black boulders for a few yards. In front of this was a little bit of green-black sand quickly being overtaken by the incoming tide. It was absolutely beautiful. It certainly didn’t fit my Wrightsville-formed conception of “going to the beach,” but I have a feeling that the next couple years are going to have a lot of altered conceptions. There was no one else in sight in either direction. We could have gone farther to the flat beach where all those people who paid to park would be, but what for? I found a high, flat place to sit and pulled out my book. It was late in the afternoon, the rocks still held some of the heat of the day, and the wind was blowing just enough to keep you from getting too warm. I sat there and realized that I was completely at peace, exactly where I’m supposed to be in the world. We caught the beginning of the sunset as we set off for the return hike. A couple of my room mates joked that next time they’d just pay the 15000, but I think the free trip was much better.