Oregon Trip

Last week we went to Portland Oregon for Brad's brother's wedding. We took an extra day and went down to Newport to play. The drive from Portland to Newport was GORGEOUS!!! Everything was so green and a beautiful. I could totally see myself living there! No Idaho wind or winters would be the best part about living there!! We played at the beach...even though it wasn't the sunny California beaches, it was still so relaxing and took away all my stresses from work. And it was the first time Brad had been to a beach!!!




We then went to the aquarium. It was pretty cool we got to watch them feed the sea otter...super cute! We got to walk through the shark tunnel and see lots of see life. The lady that worked at the front desk told us that one of the octopuses lade eggs and said it was really rare to see that...so we got to see a nest of octopus eggs...wasn't anything spectacular, but we can now say that we have seen that.






Just down the street from the aquarium was a little strip mall (I don't know if that's exactly what you call it) It was so cute. The shops didn't have anything interesting inside of them, but the outside was sweet!





We were planning on going down the the see lion caves, but decided to go whale watching instead. Brad had never seen whales before and the only time I had seen them was when I was on a trip with my family in San Fransisco and we just saw them right off shore. So this was a really cool experience for me too.


Right before we got on ship.

Here is the boat that we went whale watching in. We got out into the ocean and not even 10 minutes after we got there we heard "There she blows!" so we start looking around and sure enough we saw a huge gray whale. And then 5 minutes after that 100 yards from our boat we saw another gray whale. They named her Scar Back because her back has a huge nasty scar on her back because she got too close to a boat and her back got all cut up. I didn't get any really good pictures because it's hard to snap a picture of them when they surface because they aren't up there for very long.




On our way out to sea we dropped some crab pots off the side of the boat to see if we could catch any crabs. We got only a couple and none of them fit the size criteria so we had to throw them overboard, but now we can say we've been crab fishing.



We were coming back into port and we past the bouies (I have NO idea how to spell that) and this is what we saw...

Aren't they so cute? There were some more sea lions who took over one person's dock back at port...here are some pictures of them



Sorry some of them are sideways.
I was thinking that I wanted the life of a sea lion...fat and happy soaking up the sun....Maybe not.... I don't want to swim out into the ocean and find my food that will squirm while I'm eating it...yuck yuck gross! And I really don't want to be swimming shark bait.

ok back to our trip. When we were coming back the lady on the boat passed around some whale teeth or bristles. It was really really neat to see that. Their bristles are made out of the same material as our fingernails (karatein) kind of interesting huh? And it's crazy that those large animals eat the smallest particles in the ocean. The guide was telling us that they have to eat 5 thousand pounds of plankton a day. crazy crazy. We also saw (I didn't get pictures) dolphin like creatures...I can't remember what they are called, but they are like dolphins but smaller and darker in color.

Well that was our trip