Day 74

We went camping in the National Park this weekend!  Trevor and I were the only ones who got up early to go to the grocery store, but we got to go to Warehouse, which is the super-awesome Dutch grocery store a few miles away.  A few miles is pretty far when your only form of transportation is walking!  We got hot dogs, buns, marshmallows, and little graham cookies with chocolate coating (because they don't sell graham crackers here).  Then at 13:00 we packed up the Divemobile and headed out!

It takes about thirty minutes to get to the park, and once inside it takes another hour to go about 10 kilometers because the roads are so bad.  The Divemobile has wooden benches for seats, so it was pretty uncomfortable.  We finally got to our destination, Boca Slagbaai (also known as Slagbaai Bay), unloaded, and immediately laid on the beach.  Later that night we collected firewood and started our fire in a premade pit; we couldn't start a fire on the sand because it apparently makes the sand dangerous for sea turtles.  We don't want to kill sea turtles, so we listened!  We pigged out on hot dogs and marshmallows and s'mores, then retired to the beach to watch the sunset and have deep conversations and watch the stars.  Boca Slagbaai is basically in the middle of nowhere and the park is empty after 5, so the only light was from our fire and the sky was absolutely full of stars.  I even saw a few shooting stars!  Around 22:00 (that's 10pm) we were all so tired that we laid down our mats and fell asleep under the stars.

We woke up this morning and made bacon and french toast over the fire--not an easy feat!  (I actually started my day with a s'more and a few roasted marshmallows.  Yum!)  The Divemobile had a flat tire, but we couldn't find the tire-changing gear so the park rangers had to help us.  The boys finally found the gear and got the tire changed, thank goodness!  Some of the others jumped off a cliff into the ocean, but I am not a cliff-jumping fan so I stayed in the water to catch shoes.  We made it back home before noon and spent the rest of the day lazing around, just like every Sunday should be spent.  I'm going to miss the lazy weekends here!