4th and 5th of July

What have we been up to lately? Fireworks, surfing, and the Fair!


We walked from our apartment to Lake Murray (about a mile) and set up in an uncrowded grassy patch next to the insanely busy 4th of July party going on. The fireworks display was great, the music was patriotic, and the evening was wonderful.

This morning, I surfed just north of Windansea at a spot called Simmons. I had never surfed this spot before, so with two guys out and 6-8+ foot faces, I paddled out. I surfed my orange board which I shaped from a broken longboard. It surfs pretty good on bigger surf, although when it's locked into a line at high speed, it's really hard to turn, as I discovered a few times this morning. I discovered Simmons has a rocky bottom, which I bounced off a once or twice. The wave breaks a lot like the point at Zeros, near Leo Carrillo, but Simmons breaks harder and faster. I had a few decent waves, but the surf was inconsistent, although it was big, so I spent most of the morning waiting for waves and bouncing off of the bottom. Still, it was good fun.

Afterwords, Ashley and I went to the fair again! We looked at flowers, grabbed another giant pretzel, met a young family from Germany, and watched some racing and a demolition derby!

The first few races were fun. Ashley actually enjoyed the racing action! She said it was her favorite part of the day. Actually, she said "when the little green car pushed the other car out of the way and won!"


But, the main event was the demolition derby. It starts off like this, cars lined up all nice and pretty:

The crowd counts down from 5 and yells "DERBY!", like this:

Then, there's a little of this:

And a bit of this:

And some of this (yeah, that black car was spewing smoke for a long time! We were totally surprised it made it into the final 3):

And it all ends up looking like this (the winner was the gray car to the right of the red car):


Needless to say, it was awesome and I want to do one. Please help me convince Ashley to let me do one!