Something In The Air

Note: Here is a blog from six years ago about being in one of our favorite places doing one of our favorite things.

There is something in the air here at Long Beach, Washington that is putting a smile on everybody’s lips, and there is laughter everywhere you go.

It’s kites! Hundreds and hundreds of colorful kites.

Big kites, small kites, kites that go so fast that they make the air buzz, and kites that float lazily in the sky, moving gently on the air currents.

It’s the Washington State International Kite Festival, and I’m as excited as a kid on Christmas morning!

These colorful arches are called kite trains, and you are looking at over one thousand small handmade kites, all attached together. That’s a lot of kites!

Terry and I went down to the beach yesterday afternoon to get registered for the kite festival, stopping along the way to check out the vendor stalls selling everything from T-shirts to beach chairs to snacks and kites. Lots and lots of kites. You can buy a $10 kiddie kite or a $400 quad line Revolution kite, whatever your budget and skill level can handle.

Once we had our official wristbands, we wandered around for a while taking pictures and watching all of the action. And eventually we made our way to the roped off field where the Revolution kites were flying. These are our favorites and what we have been flying all summer.

Terry really liked the color scheme and design on this custom-made Rev. Hey baby, all it takes is money! You’re already getting the skills to handle it.

Kite flyers are all great people, and we visited with some of the Rev flyers, watching their technique and trying to absorb some of their knowledge by osmosis. I also got to meet Wayne Dowler and Joanna Chen, two of my online friends from the KiteLife website. It’s always nice to put faces with the names of people. Over the last year or so Wayne has been a great mentor, and given me a ton of tips and pointers. Who knows? Before the week is out, we may even get our Revs out there and fly with the big kids!

We’ll be back out on the beach again today, watching all the fun, Rokkaku kite battles, in which individual flyers, and then teams, compete to knock their opponents’ kites out of the sky or cut through their lines to set them free to fly away.

We left the beach a little before 5 p.m. and drove north to Ocean Park to visit Jack’s County Store, which is a requirement when we are in this area. Jack’s is sort of a general store, where you can buy anything from groceries to RV supplies, along with tools, toys, and hard to find things like antique and reproduction Aladdin lamps. We spent a couple of hours wandering the aisles, and like we do every time we go there, we found a few things we couldn’t live without.

Thought For The Day – No matter how hard life gets, go to bed thankful that you have one.