Good to see you again!! Jeremiah and I made it back to civilization after our adventure; if you want to call Kenai "civilization". We had crept away from construction and horns for a camping trip. Jeremiah started digging things out of the basement only to find that our queen sized air mattress was (hopefully) still in Fairbanks at his parents. We had two choices, 1) drive ten hours; 2) settle for a matt *sigh*. So, hubby knowing that I love to shop sent me to Fred Meyers (like a Target store for those of you who have no idea what Fred Meyers is), I practically ran to the camping section, and low and behold all of the air mattresses were all on SALE. So, I scored a foot pump (I'll explain that later), and a queen sized air mattress for a grand total of: 27 BUCKS!!! Tell me I'm good! Anyways with a "cat got the canary" smile plastered on my face, I rushed home to help hubby finish packing. We loaded up the car (matches were remembered this time!), gathered up the mutt, and headed out to our favorite spot, Clam Gulch. We arrived at 10:00 pm, (you guys all know what a horrible procrastinator I am) and what did we find? A completely crowded campsite. Both Jeremiah and I had heard that Ninilchik (Alaska is worse than Washington with those weird names), was a better place to get clams anyways. Not knowing where the campsite and beach were, we drove on. We came accross a site that had just opened up two days prior.
It was right on the buff over looking the beach and ocean. To make it even better, one of the owners helpers brought us firewood free of charge. 
Jeremiah immediatly started wrestling with the tent (they get harder and harder each year, at least that was his excuse) while I wrestled with the dog, there were so many other dogs, and they were not leashed up (my one complaint)
This is what our home started as, I silently prayed that the tent would just put it's self together so we could curl up under our mound of blankets. The wind was freezing!
The Fire King had his fun with making a fire. The wind fought him all the way!
All the while, I was trying to blow up the air mattress. ( Side story: Last year Jeremiah and I ran into the same problem, we left at about 10:00 pm on memorial weekend to go camping, we went to three campsites only to find them full. We drove 37 miles and finally found a place to set up camp. We had the air mattress, but no pump, so what does my oh-so-smart husband do, (at 1:00 am) he uses an emergency tire pump (it sounds like an air compressor) to slowly, but surely, blow the mattress up. I was mortified, it took 40 minutes. Most of the other campers were still awake and drunk, but still it was Utterly the most embarrasing thing in the world at that time, and to make it worse, he set the mattress and emergency tire pump up on the HOOD of our car which was facing the road and the rest of the camp site. I almost died.) This is why I made sure to buy a foot pump. It only took 15 minutes this time and was MUCH quieter.
Once we were all set up, we threw a couple of hamburgers on the fire. Even though we made a list to pack and made SURE that matches were at the top, we managed to forget the spatula, so my crafty man widdled a stick down and figured out how to flip the burgers using that.
Lady was so excited, there were so many other pups to play with, and tasty food cooking that must be for her. I think she was trying will a burger patty to jump out of the pan and land in front of her. With no avail she went back to begging.
Despite the fact that it was pretty cold, it was perfect. We even roasted a couple of marshmallows, by that time, I don't think any of us could feel our fingers or toes.
Finally we crashed for the night. Although, a certain mutt kept me awake, trying to sneak a bark here or there and trying to wake us up so she could go out and play with the loose dog that kept sniffing the tent. When we woke up the next morning, the wind was gone, the sky was blue and the view was gorgeous!
We fried some bacon, eggs were not possible due to the lack of spatula. 
Lady finally got to play with the other dogs for a few minutes, later we learned that her new friend was named Charlie and got a chance to meet his owners. 
Low tide was supposed to be at noon. There were supposed to be a lot of people (and there were) going clamming on the beach, the low tide was -4.2. So we packed up our clamming gear and headed down to the beach. The owner gave us some advice and wished us "happy clamming". The Jeep was not very easy to drive through the sand, but we made it. We started to walk through a patch of mud, only to sink about 9 inches. "we've been duped" Jeremiah said as we were laughing at our own stupidity. 
We finally found the not-so-wet mud and found a good place to start. Jeremiah stuck our clam gun down into the sand in hopes to find a razor clam.
Jeremiah has dubbed me the "Dimple Queen", as I was good at finding the dimples in the sand which had clams under them. My response was to tell him I knew this and I had a very fine set my self! Fifty-eight clams later and we decicded to call it quits. 
Muddy, but happy we headed back to camp to start the process of cleaning.
I left the cleaning for Jeremiah ( I get nauseated at these things). I hunted down somebody to give us a refreasher course on how to properly clean the clams. Annie, a young girl helped us out. I took a siesta (thanks to our mutt keeping me up all night, next time I am sleeping on the inside of the bed) and let Jeremiah have fun with the clams. Four hours later we were on our way again.
Jeremiah wanted some ice cream. so we hunted down the only Dairy Queen in the state of Alaska. It was a great treat, however to my dismay I found that not only did jeremiah have a nice sun burn, but my nose and cheeks had gotten a pretty good one as well.
We were pretty exhausted and thankful for a bed we didn't have to blow up. We had a blast and were Happy Clammers in the end. Our next adventure will take place next weekend when we head to Valdez for a couple of days to visit Jeremiah's folks. We hope that you have all had a fun and safe weekend and hope that this next week goes by quickly for you.
Good night from the Igloodwellerz.
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