This weekend Andreas and I are going hiking with my dad and godmother to a stretch of the Washington coastline called Ozette. It’s a strip of coast that’s a deeply entrenched part of my family — my mother lived in a tent out at Ozette for several summers in the early ’70s and my father would hike out to visit. There are family legends of my mother sunbathing naked and being found by boyscout troops.

Beginning when I was 8-years-old, I started backpacking out every summer with my parents, hiking five miles with my little external frame backpack to this particular special little cove just north of a stretch of beach known as Yellow Banks. I could ramble on for ages about all the various family traditions — blips and flaming groovies and mermaid coves and witches caves and on and on. It was a great place to spend time as a kid.

I’ve only been back once in the last decade. Andreas and I hiked out with my mother for a long weekend in 1998 and since then I’ve stuck with the shorter trails of La Push, WA. But Ozette, Ozette. The sentimentalist in gets all wobbly over the thought of going back … but then I remember things like “Oh hey! It was at Ozette in 1983 that I realized I had parasitic intestinal worms!” or “Hey, remember that one time when there was that enormous bloated dead sea lion carcass just up the beach from where we were camped and my dad told stories about how it was a cursed indian prince who would shlump down the beach at night looking for his princess and it freaked all my friends out?” Then some of the nostalgia fades and I’m just happy to be going back to a place so rich with history.

Also, the weather supposed to kick ass this weekend. That’s a rare thing on the Washington Coast. I intent to hop in the freezing cold waves, spend hours gazing into tidepools, and get a skin-degenerating sunburn of some sort. It will be awesome.