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  Mizzle my rizzleAug 19, 2010 2:59 AM PDT | url
 
Added 3 new A* pages:Okay I wanted to waste some time talking about where I went camping, because eh well I don't get out much, so humor me. :P We went to Grayland Beach State Park, and here's even a satellite view of our exact camping spot. Now, if you zoom that view out and scroll west (left) to the beach, you'll notice a sort of bluish pall over the sand. If you check a street level view from just outside the park, you'll notice a grayish overcastedness to the whole scene. You can see this pall lurking over the whole area as you approach.
 
So there's a reason this place is called Grayland. ;) The rest of Western Washington was in a 90-degree-plus heat wave this past weekend, but besides the coastal cool, which knocks off maybe ten degrees or so, Grayland has its own misty chill that drops the mercury another oh fifteen degrees maybe, so inside Grayland's magical spell, it was kinda chilly! And the perpetual mist is constantly condensing around you and falling in little scattered droplets perhaps locally known (okay it was a term I overheard while in the bathroom :P) as "mizzle."
 
By check-out at 1:00 pm the second day, the sun was almost getting through Grayland's low cloud barrier, the mizzle had ceased, and as we went to the beach, with blue sky visible along the horizon inland, I almost thought the fog would burn off and give us clear sunshine. Nope! On the beach, which is really quite impressive--maybe 100 yards of sand to the water at low tide, stretching in both directions as far as you can see, which isn't as far as it would be anywhere else on Earth--you could actually see billows of fresh mist coming in off the ocean, replacing any amount that the afternoon summer sun could burn off. We played frisbee for a while, and my friend who was stationed closest to the water told me the disc would sometimes vanish from his view in mid-flight.
 
So that was interesting! Pretty good place to be during a heat wave, I guess, but I dunno how comfortable it would be in any other circumstances. The empty and somewhat otherworldly expanse of gray sand and ocean I saw on the beach in the morning gave me some definite thoughts for alien worlds. ;D
 
(Oh yah, the "Cranberry" you'll see on the road sign there isn't mere local color; there's a huge Ocean Spray facility a little way down the main road.)
 
 
 
 
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