What an awesome day today with Carol’s Birthday, Halloween and we even went Crabbing for the first time! Long post, with many pictures, but such an awesome day.
I woke up early to start getting things ready to decorate the trailer with the girls, for Carol’s Birthday. I wanted to make sure we had everything setup before Carol woke up, and that we were quiet enough to not wake her up. I had bought things yesterday and left “hidden” in the truck, so I had to go outside, go to the truck get everything and come back without making a lot of noise. Hahahaha. Oh, and around 6am.
I got my shoes lined up by the bathroom door, which is the furthest away from our bedroom. I had the space heaters going for extra white noise too. I was able to open the bathroom door really carefully and not make any noise, and then get to the truck, unlock it and get all the stuff, then go back inside. I kind of arranged everything before waking up the girls, so we’d not make too much noise.
The girls told me they wanted to help with decorating, so I woke them up and they both jumped out of bed. Oh, you know, like they never do when I wake them up for school. Hahahahah… It was fun planning how to setup the decoration with them. We had a birthday banner, so we hung it up by the dinette.
We had balloons with the number 4 and number 0, so Bella filled them up while Bia changed the little sign we have to Happy Bday S2 *.
Bia also made a “cake” with the giant marshmallows, so we could put the candles with the 40 on it. I finished wrapping the gift.
Then it was balloon time. I had bought 40 balloons, and this device that would fill them all up within 40 seconds, all of them at once! We were all excited to see that work, so we setup Bella in the bathroom with me to fill up the balloons, while Bia stayed in the kitchen to make sure Carol would not wake up and get out of the bedroom. The device was a pump with some special plugs, so I knew it’d make noise. Bella had already stuck all the little pipes from the balloons into the pump and we were ready to go. We had the device and all the balloons on the floor in the bathroom, with Bella sitting next to it. I turned the pump on, and sure enough, pump noise… and we had to go quick not to wake Carol up.
Within seconds the balloons were half way filled up already, and it was fast to realize, a bit too late, that 40 balloons would probably fill up most of the bathroom! hahahahah… It didn’t take long for Bella to be completely covered in balloons, and most of the bathroom floor to be covered. I let it fill up until we had no more room in the bathroom, which I think was half way, and all of that was about 20 seconds! I had to take a few balloons at a time out of the bathroom to make room for Bella to be able to get up and out.
Then, each girl took 10 balloons to make a bouquet, and I just hung the rest wherever I could fit them. We all also signed the birthday card, and arranged the cake, card and gift, and we were ready. It was almost 8am, and I thought for sure we would have woken Carol up, but nope… she was snoring! Bella changed and we all went in the bedroom to wake her up.
We piled up on Carol, wished her happy birthday, happy 40th birthday! Lots of love, hugs, love, hugs, kisses…. Then we got Carol out of the room to see her surprise. And she was surprised, and had not heard anything. She loved the surprise, the decoration, the card, the gift. Yeeee…
We got Carol a foldable cart that she can use to haul laundry, or haul stuff to the beach. The girls loved the cart and were playing with and in it right away. They even took a few laps around the campground pulling each other in it, while Carol and I got ready to go. I had tried to make a few plans for a surprise for breakfast (catering), but it didn’t work, so we all got ready to leave to have breakfast somewhere.
I picked a place that was more family style and had eggs Benedict, which is Carol’s favorite. We went to Stockpile, which is a smaller, family restaurant style. Food was great there, but their pandemic protection was not so great, it was just ok, felt like they did the minimum to be open. Carol had her eggs Benedict and love it.
The girls had sunny side up eggs and bacon. I had a chorizo omelet which was really good. And we all shared one big pancake. That was a lot of food, and we were stuffed when we left. Carol received calls all day from the time she woke up, so all in between everything we did in the day, she got calls.
From there, we drove to the board walk, I wanted to see if we’d see anyone crabbing or be able to do something there. As we parked, Carol saw a lady wearing a witch costume hauling a stand up paddle board to the water, and got excited to follow her and see her in the water with her costume. So, we went to the boardwalk and scoped it out, and waited for the witch to go in the water. hahahah…
Bella wanted to fish, so we went back to the car and got our stuff. I brought a few fishing things in the box, but it’s all lake stuff, not sure any of it will be much good in the ocean, but we tried. On top of maybe no having the right bait, it was windy and the tide was strong, so not very good for fishing anyway.
The witch lady was in the water for maybe 20-30 minutes max, and when she came out her and Carol were talking for a while. The lady was originally from Milwaukee and was super nice, giving Carol lots of tips on places to go and see, and most importantly, where to rent crabbing gear and try it. So, we decided to keep moving and go to the crabbing place.
Bella had not caught anything, and actually lost a hook as it got stuck on something under water. There was a candy store across the street from the car, so we checked it out first. The store had a few things they made, but most of their stuff was big brands, so we left. I wanted to stop at the big candy store we keep driving by, so we did that on the way to the crabbing place. That one was nice, they made everything there, so we got some chocolate, some toffy, etc. I got a “hot chocolate”, which was chocolate with Cayenne peppers, and it was pretty good. The girls got a lot taffies and Carol got a chocolate as well.
Then we drove to the bait shop near the pier in Charleston, which is very close to our campground. The guy there was super nice, and funny, and explained how everything worked, what we needed to do, how to get crabs and all, so I got a crabbing license online quick, and we rented the net, bucket and bait, which was some fish heads and pieces of fish, and went to the pier to start our crabbing adventure.
Crabbing is quite simple actually. Put the fish in the little basket inside the net, lower the entire thing to the bottom of the ocean.
You then wait a few minutes to give the crabs time to go eat your fish, then pull the entire thing up with a few crabs in it.
Then, decide which are big enough to keep using the yellow ruler they give you, you should not keep females as they have eggs usually, and that’s it.
I lowered our first attempt, and the girls were not very patient and wanted to see it within less than 5 minutes, so I pulled it back up and sure enough… 3 crabs were in the net. They were all smaller than we could keep, so we just let them escape from the net and jump back in the water. The process is very cool and exciting though, and seeing the crabs in the net, then dealing with them, measuring, releasing, is cool. You also get to see a lot of marine life in the process. Lots of mussels and clams in the area, lots of star fish and the water had a lot of jelly fish swimming by.
We were near the end of the peer, and at some point a big boat came in and we had to move. When the boat came in, the birds knew what was going to happen, so they all flew towards the boat to eat scraps of fish, as it was a fishing boat. We had to move because there were so many seagulls around us.
The other animal the boat attracted was much cooler, sea lions! We saw quite a few sea lions near us by the pier from that point on. When I was managing the net, we did not get any crab that was big enough. Carol wanted to handle it, and Bella wanted to try fishing, so I let Carol take over and went to the truck with Bella to get the fishing stuff.
Once Carol got started, she caught some bigger crabs and started adding them to the bucket, and she was having a lot of fun and kept going.
Carol would pull up the net and each time there were crabs, and most times they were big enough.
And they were getting bigger, and she was getting more excited about Crabbing. hahaha
And from this point on, she wanted to stay there all day, and go back next day too. hahahahaha… Crab master.
Bella didn’t catch any fish again :(. But I blame the bad weather and wrong baits I brought along on the trip.
Carol was crabbing for maybe an hour, and we decided we should get going so we could come back to the marina for the “trunk or treating” event, and then go to our dinner.
We went back to the store so they guy could teach Carol how to clean the crab. First thing he did was to review the crabs she had, and he separated 3 that needed to be returned to the water. The biggest one was a female, so we had to dump it back in the water, along with the other 2 that were just a tad smaller than we could. This left 2 to be cleaned, so the guy went to it. He straddled the bucket with his legs, and grabbed the crab by the shell, while holding it’s front pinchers open. He told Carol his method was nice for the crabs, and more humane, and just then yelled out and crushed the crab in half on the edge of the bucket. hahahahaha…. Holy shit! The noise it made was funny and shocking. There were some other people watching and started laughing. Bella did not like it and kind of cried. Bia didn’t like it either. He then broke the legs out, threw the shell to the street, then cleaned out anything that was not white (guts mainly) and that was it. He grabbed the second one and did the same thing. Crabs were handled. All that was left was to wash up anything and boil them.
Bia and I went back to the water to dump back the crabs we should not keep.
Carol got all the stuff ready to go and decided we’d take the left over fish, bucket and net back as she had so much fun she wanted to try to go tomorrow morning. We move tomorrow, so I doubt we’ll do it, but it’s her birthday so let’s take it. I have to say, it was very fun to go crabbing, and I’m very glad we did it. Can’t leave Coos Bay without trying crabbing.
We drove back home and everyone showered, changed into costumes, and we went back to the marina for trunk or treating.
The girls were excited to be in costumes, and also have Carol and I in costumes with them, especially matching their costumes. The event itself was ok, it is small so we were done in less than 15 minutes. We just parked, got out and walked from car to car in about 2 rows of cars, they lined up and got candy or whatever they were giving.
It was enough to get the girls happy and some feeling of trick or treating at least. Oh, earlier at the candy store the clerk gave them each a trick of treat bag, and they were very excited to get that.
From there we went to the dinner we had reservations for. The place is so nice. They had more decorations and 2 photo booth spots.
Everyone had costumers on, so that was very cool as well. We had some drinks, had our pizza, enjoyed watching all the different costumes. They had live music too, which was nice.
Then a girl did some dancing with a hoola hoop that had LED lights and create a super cool effect as she was spinning and doing her dance. Bia loved it and went to talk to the girl.
Now the girls want LED hoola hoops hahahah.
We had a good time at dinner, but because we woke up so early, around 8pm or so we were all kind of tired.
We stayed a bit more to see the last performance from the girl, and headed out.
When we got back to the camper, we “remembered” all the decorations were still out, and all 40 balloons were still there. So we started getting ready for bed, and putting away decorations. We left a few out, but didn’t know what to do with the balloons, so Bella and I started a balloon stabbing competition. We would throw one balloon at a time to the other, who had to stab it and pop it with the little carving knife we got for the pumpkin carving. If you popped it, you got the next balloon, if you didn’t you had to throw the balloon to the other, and so on. Hahahaha that was FUN! Carol wanted in as well, and we were done popping balloons in no time. I got all the balloon pieces cleaned up quite quickly as well.
It was a long and fun day, and we were in bed around 10pm. Happy 40th Birthday Carol, we love you!
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