Thanks to my wife’s second sister, we booked an apartment at Xiaojing Bay in Yapojiao last week. The original plan was simple: head to the coast on Army Day, let the kids play in the water, stay one night, and come back the next day.
It was a big family outing. My eldest sister came with her two children, my third sister brought her family, my wife’s uncle came with his family, and the four of us went too. In total there were 16 people, including 7 kids. My wife’s second sister’s family is still in Hong Kong and hasn’t been able to return to the mainland since early 2020 because of the pandemic. Even this year’s lychees had to be mailed over to them.
As usual, the weather had other ideas. A few days earlier it had been bright and sunny, but by the weekend a typhoon had rolled in. That took some of the excitement out of the trip, though not enough to cancel it. The apartment had been booked privately and couldn’t be refunded, so we went anyway, driving through wind and rain.
To make things worse, my rhinitis flared up the night before. My nose was blocked all night and I barely slept. By morning my head felt heavy and foggy, and I was in no shape to think about the beach. After breakfast I collapsed back into bed and stayed there until it was time to meet everyone after lunch at the residential parking lot.
I still wasn’t feeling much better before leaving, so I stopped by a nearby clinic and got a day’s worth of medicine. The doctor warned me it might make me drowsy, so I held off on taking it. The drive was about 70 kilometers, roughly half on regular roads and half on the expressway. The rain came and went—sometimes light, sometimes hard—so I drove carefully and got there in about an hour. After meeting up, we went to a nearby supermarket and picked up noodles, vegetables, dumplings, and some prepared food for dinner. My mother-in-law also brought along a cooked chicken from home.
Once we checked into the complex, it turned out the beach was only about a five-minute walk straight out of the main gate. But at that point I wanted a bed more than I wanted the sea. My son had started fussing too, sleepy and wanting milk, so I took him with me and the two of us fell asleep together. The others unloaded their bags, changed into swimsuits, grabbed their float rings, and headed straight for the shore. The weather may have been bad, but it did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm.
After taking the medicine and sleeping, I woke up around five o’clock feeling much better. My third sister hadn’t gone to the beach either, since she was staying with her one-and-a-half-year-old son. My own son was still asleep, so I took the key card and decided to walk down to the beach for a look. But when I reached the gate, I saw everyone already gathered there waiting. They had come back and needed me, the one holding the resident access card, to let them in.
Not long after we got back to the apartment, the rain started pouring down. In that sense, the weather was oddly considerate—it waited until everyone had played enough before really opening up.
After dinner, I still wasn’t ready to give up on the outing entirely, so I took my daughter and son out for a walk to see the beach at night. Maybe because of the typhoon, it wasn’t packed with crowds. Honestly, that made it better.
Sleeping arrangements that night were a bit of a joke. There was one 1.5-meter bed for me and my two kids. A 1.8-meter bed went to my wife’s uncle’s family of four. There was also a bunk bed for my third sister’s family, their child, and my mother-in-law. My father-in-law, my eldest sister, and my wife ended up taking over the living room. A pretty funny setup, really.
The next morning it was still raining, so there was no chance to go out for another walk. After breakfast we could only stay in the apartment, watch TV, and chat. And just like that, the whole morning was gone. Then it was time to pack up, tidy the place, check out, and head back to our separate homes.
To be honest, the seawater there really wasn’t as clean as the water around Pinghai’s Shuangyue Bay. No wonder that stretch of coast is more popular.