beach fort

after spending the morning & early afternoon of fourth of july in the direct sun at tomales bay, a couple of us insisted on staying in the shade at stinson beach. our equipment: one tarp, two foldable chairs, one old bedsheet.

our first pass, version 1.0 - kevin & cindy are holding up either side of the tent.



version 1.05 - not much difference, except now i'm holding up the side and dave sneeks in.


version 1 was just not working for us - i think we tried tying down the back side with some pieces of wood we found, but it still didn't work, so we went through a major redesign. we brainstormed, with brilliant ideas such as lying flat on the sand and just laying the tarp on top of us (uh, can we say big four-person body bag?). eventually, we came up with 2.0.

version 2.0 - we rotated the tarp so that it actually created more shade, tied down the back side, and tried to tie the top ends to tallest thing we had - the chairs.


this semi-worked except if the wind died down, the tarp literally fell on our faces.

we did a version 2.1 (which i have no pics of) which basically consisted of us trying to find a better way to get the top part to stay up.

but all in all, not bad with the materials we had. by the way, everyone else who was watching us go through this (we literally spent our whole time at the beach making this thing work) could not stop laughing at us. but hey, we did get to enjoy the fruit of our hard work. and if we didn't create our beach fort, i couldn't even imagine how much redder i'd be right now. maybe i'd have two sunburned hands. hehe :)

rest of fourth of july pics on my smugmug. too lazy to link directly, but smugmug link is on the right.