Family Day at the Beach

My Mom, Dad, sister and I went to Vancouver a couple of years ago. Dad was presenting at a conference for the International Thomas Merton Society, which was held at the University of British Columbia. Since Mom, lil' Sis and I needed to occupy ourselves while Dad was with fellow Mertonites, we explored the city and the campus.

After a long, hard day of vacation, Mom decided we would get popsicles and hang out on the beach. The UBC campus is gorgeous and right on the ocean. After walking along the perimeter of campus, we found a path down to the water. The trail cut very steeply through thick trees and beach-goers had to climb down hundreds and hundreds of steps to reach the bottom. When we finally emerged from the tunnel of trees, breathless, sweaty, and tired our feet happily met the sand. All I can remember next is wild, painful laughter.

My Mom had inadvertently taken my sister and me to Vancouver's only nude beach. And we were stuck there. I can't imagine the naked people really believed we were laughing with them. We were exploding with giggles AT them. Mom, who was horrified, kept telling us to look away and stare into the sand dunes, but it was just too much. My MOTHER took us to a NUDE BEACH. HAHAHAHA. Does that make us trendy?

After we stopped screaming with laughter long enough to recover from our trek down to the beach, we started back up the 1.4 billion steps to the land where people wear pants. The worst part was that everyone descending the staircase thought we were returning from an afternoon with our family buns in the sun.