I had resigned my commission for the Army National Guard. I was no longer an officer and I no longer had a military obligation. Since the day we had married, everything was connected to military meetings. Weekend drills, planning meetings, summer camps, Armor Officer Branch school at Fort Knox, Kentucky, it seemed that all spare moments went to the National Guard.

But now I was out, and so it meant that we could take our first family vacation together. I was working for a Chevrolet-Cadillac dealership and my boss had just given me a 1982 diesel-powered Chevette for a demo. It was small but it was great. It got nearly forty miles per gallon, and it had air conditioning. Carol packed everything into it and we headed for the Oregon Coast.

We went by way of Mount Ranier, puttering along with the little diesel car, looking at the scenery, stopping whenever someone said they needed to stop. We had two kids in those days. Darren and Kristen each had a car seat and they were great travelers as kids go.

We motored past Rainier, onto I-5 and headed south. We crossed the Columbia River at Longview, drove to Astoria and then down to Seaside, Oregon, where we stayed with my first pastor, Dayle, and his wife, Carolynn. From Seaside, we drove down the Oregon Coast, arriving at Bandon Oregon in late evening. Carol had a cousin, Paul, who pastored the Bandon Conservative Baptist Church. We hadn't seen him or his wife, Connie for several years.

We arrived and spent the next few days having a great visit. Paul had been in Bandon for five or six years and we talked about life, books, church and everything else that came to mind. The kids got along well with Paul and Connie's three boys and things were swimming.

Paul asked me if I had ever gone crabbing and I told him I hadn't so he suggested that we try it the next day. I was game and so the next morning we got up, ate some breakfast and gathered up the equipment. It was the third week of June. Paul said the crabs had just molted out of their old shells and grown their new ones. This meant that you would get a size 5 crab in a size 6 shell but that we should still have a lot of fun and get some that we could keep and eat.

We loaded up Paul's crab rings and and some skunky-smelling chicken parts and old fish heads and down to the docks we went. Paul wired the stinky chicken and fish heads into the center of each crab ring and then tied the anchor line to one of the cleats on the dock. Over the side went the crab ring, down to the bottom of the boat basin. We put out three rings about twenty feet from each other. Every five or ten minutes, Paul would say it was time to check them and we'd pull them up to see if they had anything in them. It was crab heaven that day.

Nearly every pull would bring up a ring loaded with crabs. Paul had a measuring gauge to measure each crab to see if it was a legal keeper. You checked them to see if they were a boy crab or a girl crab, girls went back over the side. Boys were then measured to see if they were big enough to keep, 6 inches in Oregon was what it took to keep one. We would get one or two keepers with every pull. Most went back over the side. But it was great fun. The crabs would be scurrying around inside the trap and when you opened it up they would raise their pinchers and snap, snap, snap at you to defend themselves. It only took a few pinches to realize that you needed to be quick to get around the pinchers.

We stayed throughout the day, the tide came and went, and Paul's sister Janey and a friend showed up from California. We quit about nine o'clock at night. We had a lot of crabs. We took them back to the house and I wondered what we were going to do with all of them. What do you do when you have crabs? You cook 'em, clean 'em, and you eat 'em.

Paul got a giant pot of water boiling on the stove and in went the crabs. They turned a bright red when they were cooked. After cooking we put them out on the kitchen table to get pictures. There are over forty of them on the table. They didn't go to waste. We sat out in the back yard and cleaned them and then cracked all of the shells and filled a giant tub with crab meat. On Wednesday night we took them to the church for a Wednesday night crab feed. Everyone ate crab, salad and deserts until he was full. It was a great experience.