Your Greatest Childhood Adventure!

[OldeDude]

For some reason I’ve been doing a good bit of reminiscing these last few days, maybe because I was fighting a raging fever for almost five days, and have had lots of quiet time unable to sleep. Thankfully the fever finally broke and I’m hopefully back to normal. Anyway, I got to thinking about what I consider my greatest childhood adventure, so I thought I’d share it here, and ask the rest of you to share some of yours. I figure to qualify as a childhood adventure you can go all the way through your High School years, those later teen years should make for some great posts. So here’s mine, it was actually an unauthorized adventure (didn’t tell Mom and Dad where I was really going ), and it may be kind of long.

Camping on the beach for a week at San Onofre State Beach California, summer of 1973

The initial Idea

Being a 15-year-old surfer in Southern California was great, but getting to the beach every day wasn’t easy. Me and my friends were still a year short of having driver’s licenses, older friends could only give us rides sometimes, and parents were working. That left hitch-hiking (tough with surfboards), the bus (surfboards not allowed, but we got to know the schedules of some drivers that would let us on), and 12 miles each way was too far to walk carrying a surfboard.

I had started surfing when I was 11, so by 15 me and my two best friends, Mike and Guy, were 100% into the surfing lifestyle, and days away from the waves were really tough. So, Guy comes up with the idea, how about we go spend a whole week at San Onofre, one of our favorite spots. He said his Mom could take us down there, drop us off, and pick us up. Mike said no way his parents would let him go, and I was sure mine wouldn’t either, so Guy says, “Tell your parents we’re staying with my cousins in Oceanside.” You know, that might just work! So, I got the okay from my folks, but Mike couldn’t, so it would just be me and Guy.

 

[OldeDude]

Planning

Guy and I started planning what we needed to take, surfboards of course, sleeping bags, a small tent, a small ice chest, food and drinks, something to cook on, clothes/towels/boardshorts, and of course being teenagers of the 70s, enough pot to keep a nice buzz going all week.

One logistic problem, San Onofre State beach is kind of remote, at least in a weird California way. It is just a few miles south of San Clemente, but the next town is Oceanside, about 25 miles south. To get to San Onofre you exit I5 just outside of San Clemente, head south, go just past the nuclear power plant, and get to the park entrance. The park extends several miles south, with train tracks and I5 on the east side, and completely surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and Camp Pendleton Marine Base. Parking is all along the park road, but you have to hike one of the many trails down the bluff to get to the beach.

So anything we take will have to be packed down to the beach by two 15-year-olds. We got a couple of army surplus backpacks, but it was still going to take some doing, as we couldn’t figure out how we could pack it all down in one trip. We would be getting there on a weekday, which meant it wouldn’t be too busy, but we still couldn’t leave anything behind while we made the 20 – 30 minute round trip down to the beach and back. So we packed pretty light, and would figure the rest out when we got there.

 

[OldeDude]

The adventure begins

Well here we are, Guy’s Mom drops us and all our stuff off at the trailhead to our favorite surf break at San Onofre, and she will be back to pick us up same time next week! As she drives off, we look at all our stuff and wonder how we’re going to get it all down to the beach. Since there is no one else around, we decide to take anything we can’t carry in one trip down the trail a bit and hide it in the bushes, then one of us will come back up and get it. Problem solved.

We get our camp set up, and there are a few others camping in the area. At the bottom of the trail there is a nice surf break off to the north, but the bluff comes in closer to the beach there, so no room for camping. The other good surf break is just off the south side of the trail, with a much deeper beach and plenty of room for camping. We ended up being neighbors with a Father and Son, the Son being college age, that were camping there all summer.

What an incredible experience! We got to be good friends with our neighbors, and the weather and waves were fantastic all week. The nights were amazing, the bluff blocked out the noise from the nearby highway, and it was far enough away from town that there was no effect of city lights, so the night sky was brilliant. I could go on forever about some of the wild things that I experienced that week, but I’ll just hit some of the highlights.

It was a major chore to go back to San Clemente, of course we had made friends that would watch our stuff, but we had to go at least twice to supplement our groceries, and for me to find a pay phone and call home to let Mom know I was okay.

Even with the trips to San Clemente we were really short on food. We found a couple of solutions though, one was bartering. What we weren’t short on was pot, and our neighbors were more than willing to trade a loaf of bread and some lunchmeat for a little smoke! The other came to us over the weekend. We were out surfing the break just north of camp, when a group of total jerks came in and set up their camp between ours and the ocean. Now there is such a thing as surf camp etiquette, and one of those things is campers set up further back on the beach, leaving plenty of room for day users. Another is you don’t set up your camp between another camp and the ocean, and these Bozos had just done both. That’s where the Yogi Bearing comes in. These guys were jerks, were only going to be there for the weekend thankfully, so we considered them fair game to Yogi Bear their food supply.

I guess that’s enough for now, if others share their adventures, and keep this thread going for a while, I might add more.

One other thing that made this adventure so memorable, that was the last year they allowed camping on the beach, the following year they changed it so you had to camp up in the parking lot, which just isn’t the same.

 

[OldeDude]

How could I have left this out?

SHARK!

Okay, middle of the week, starting to get late, we’re surfing the break just north of camp and decide it’s time to call it a day. Of course that always means after the next good wave, so after a bit I catch a nice left, take it all the way in to shore, and sit on the beach to watch Guy's last wave. As soon as I sit down I see there is a pod of dolphins coming in for some evening surf, which is an incredible thing to watch, especially if you’re out in the water with them, that is one of the all-time best experiences ever. So on the one hand I’m enjoying watching them while keeping an eye on Guy, on the other I’m thinking I could probably paddle back out by the time they get to the break. Before I can get up and head back out, I see Guy start paddling towards shore like mad. I know just what’s going on, and get a really big grin on my face. Guy gets in to shore, turns towards the water and points, but just before he asks “Did you see that shark?”, he sees that it’s dolphins, turns to see me laughing my a$$ off, throws his board down and says “Swear to God I though it was a shark!”. I told him that was obvious, be both then had a good laugh, sat down and watched the dolphins play in the waves until it was too dark to see.

 

[OldeDude]

 

[OldeDude]

Ok, I'm bumping this one last time. I don't know if I'm just completely delusional from running a fever for the last ten days, thinking this is an interesting topic, and it really isn't, or that no one else on this forum had a very interesting childhood, and no one has any adventures to share.

 

[Drumdog]

My greatest adventure as a child was when my dad was in the Air Force. We were stationed at Albrook AFB in the Panama Canal Zone in the late 60's.
He got transferred to Fairchild AFB in Spokane Washington. Mom and dad sold the 2 cars they had and bought a new, empty VW van that had only the 2 front seats in it.
Dad built it into a camper and the 6 of us (mom, dad and us 4 boys) drove from Panama to Spokane Washington. We had 30 days to get dad reported in at Fairchild, so we took our time bouncing around Central America and then up through Mexico into Texas and then up to Spokane. It would take me hours to type out all the great experiences we had while on the trip, but I will say this. It is a memory that I will never forget.

 

[OldeDude]

My greatest adventure as a child was when my dad was in the Air Force. We were stationed at Albrook AFB in the Panama Canal Zone in the late 60's.
He got transferred to Fairchild AFB in Spokane Washington. Mom and dad sold the 2 cars they had and bought a new, empty VW van that had only the 2 front seats in it.
Dad built it into a camper and the 6 of us (mom, dad and us 4 boys) drove from Panama to Spokane Washington. We had 30 days to get dad reported in at Fairchild, so we took our time bouncing around Central America and then up through Mexico into Texas and then up to Spokane. It would take me hours to type out all the great experiences we had while on the trip, but I will say this. It is a memory that I will never forget.

Now that's what I'm talking about! A month long adventure through Central America and Mexico, that would be a lifelong memory!

My first ever air travel was like that. I was five years old, fall/winter of 1963/64. We lived in SoCal, and my dad got a construction job on Catalina Island (25 miles off the coast from Long Beach), the job was going to be at least four months, so Dad decided that we would just move over there for the duration., so my first time on an airplane was a seaplane! So many memories from living on the island, but I will never forget the excitement of taking off and landing in the water at five years old.

 

[Chef23]

Based on that story I still haven’t done anything interesting in my life.

 

[OldeDude]

Based on that story I still haven’t done anything interesting in my life.

Don't sell yourself short, an adventure can be in the eye of the beholder.
One of my Dad's favorite stories about my brother was when he was four (he's two years older than me), and we had just moved into a new house. My brother disappeared, my parents couldn't find him anywhere. Just before panic really set in, there he was in the front yard. Mom and Dad asked him where he'd been, and he said following the sidewalk. He had walked around the block to see where the sidewalk went. Too him it was big adventure.

 

[Slowmo]

So a friend of mine had a Cajun pirouqe (think flat bottom canoe that only needs about 2in of water) and we decided to go explore the small channels through the marsh on the MS golf coast. We got pretty far out and then the tide went out, leaving us probably a mile deep in the marsh with no water. Being the smart young children we were we decided we would just hop out of the boat and carry it back. We hop out of the boat and sink waist deep in the mud. Out only way to move around turned out to be to lay flat on the mud, push the boat forward a few feet and belly crawl and repeat. It took us hours to get out of the maze of the marsh. In the meantime the sun went down. A few hours after dark we could hear our parents riding around in the fishing boats calling for us looking for us. They finally heard us yell back but it still took a good hour to finish clearing out of the maze. Fortunately they were so happy we were ok that we didn't get grounded.