Cherry Blossom Candy Leaf

As you may or may not know, one of Marilyn's favorite places was Pismo Beach. She liked the weather: it never gets hot (or even warm). She enjoyed the food like clam chowder in a bread bowl or her bacon wrapped filet mignon at Mc Clintock's. But she mostly loved that the whole family was there: Keith, Danny, Jeremy, Jennifer, Trevor, Jake and Chad, sometimes Grandma, and Ben and I, along with Marilyn, would all make the trip. And even though we would each come to Pismo with our own plans for the long weekend, we would always meet up for dinner.

So every year we would book rooms at the Edgewater Inn and fight the often horrendous Labor Day traffic to do the Pismo family thing. I am so happy and grateful for the memories of our Pismo trips. Our little brother Danny started going up to Pismo as a baby and I have old video footage of us fishing on the pier when he was 4 or 5 years old. He will be 18 in May. One year, we had to dig the Durango out of the sand dunes and when we took breaks from our digging, we would slide down 30 foot walls of sand. That same year, Keith crashed the Durango at the dunes, broke the radiator and we had to get towed out. It was so scary the way he was driving that thing with sand in his contacts. I remember thinking I was going to fall out the window the way the the car was tilting and sliding! I saw sea otters in the wild for the first time, floating on their backs in Morro Bay and even saw a kid catch a fairly large shark off the Pismo Beach Pier. Keith tried to teach me to surf on his short board in the frigid waters in front of the hotel. Many of the memories overlap and Ben and I can't seem to figure out what year some of them happened. Like all the dinners... going to the same restaurants, always Brad's and Mc Clintock's. Rightfully so, the wine tasting trips blend into one another. Many of the fishing memories start with a long pier and end in the same way, with an occasional bullhead, crab or sting ray catch, and if someone was really lucky, a too small, and thus illegal, mackerel.

There are so many things that have happened in Pismo and because of Pismo. I think about it with both a happy and sad heart. Ben's mom has been gone for almost three years. And although we always made the trip, at times we even complained about it (the traffic!!!), we still made the journey. As you may remember from my Oahu post, we decided to go to Hawaii instead of Pismo this year to make a new memory and to do something different. And after Oahu when Labor Day approached, suddenly we were excited to go to Pismo again. And because we hadn't cancelled our reservation, made as we checked out the previous year, we decided to go to Pismo again!