Guest bloggage (take 3)- Coast trip

Well, it's been a few weeks since the kids and I went to the Oregon coast, so here's my recap. We left Friday and drove 4-5 hours to Newport, Oregon. We quickly found our oceanside hotel, went down to the beach, and took the picture above. As you can see from the kids' clothes, it was chilly, but thankfully no rain fell on us while we were there.

Saturday morning we went to the aquarium. It was kind of small, but it definitely had a lot of cool things.

Here's where the kids spent close to an hour. Ethan was mesmorized by the sharks, and didn't want to leave when everyone else was done. Afterward, he was telling any volunteer who would listen what the differences were between bamboo and leopard sharks!

After petting the sharks and rays, we saw the standard otters, seals, etc. and came to another touchy feely exhibit.

We really enjoyed the aquarium, but we had seen everything after about 3 hours. We went back to the little sharks one last time and headed out. There was a visitor's center next door hosted by the university, so we decided to give that a try. It was pretty cool also, especially since it was free.

More petting:

We wanted to hit the lighthouse and tide pools that day, so we cut the visitor center visit short.


We took the tour up the lighthouse, but they wouldn't let us out on the balcony. Lame! That's OK, because we then went to the beach, where we had the absolute coolest time! We quickly wished we had cut our aquarium run short, because there were A TON of animals to check out there, all for free!

Check out the littlest hermit crab evah!

This was really the highlight of our trip. There were tons of little pools that were teeming with life. We all enjoyed it a lot, and wished we had gotten there earlier. Unfortunately, the tide started coming back in, and bathroom issues had to be attended to. We went back to the hotel, and Elise wanted to take a few pictures of the beach. She had seen a kid's photo contest and she wanted to enter it.

We walked down to the beach at just the right time. Here's some pics I took:

A full but great day Saturday. It was marred only by our hotel toilet overflowing twice. Sunday morning I girded myself for the confrontation with the hotel clerk. I wanted a day off my bill, which they wouldn't give me. But they gave us a $40 voucher for lunch, which we used later that day. Squeeky wheel, meet grease...

We had heard that the pier was pretty cool, so we spent a couple of hours there before we left. Here was the coolest part:

As you can see, there were about 15 sea lions literally under our noses. They were pretty funny to watch. They were all sunning and quiet, until one of them moved. Then all of them would bark like crazy for awhile. The kids loved watching them. Samantha and Elise even named a few.

All in all, a GREAT weekend. We love Newport! We need to take Tracey over there next year when it gets warmer. Next time, we'll spend the whole day at the tide pools!