Fun Days By the Ocean

On Tuesday we woke up bright and early, and headed just a little ways down the road to the Oregon Coast Aquarium. It had been sprinkling a little that morning but it tapered off as we started walking around at the outdoor exhibits. If you have never been there, it is a very neat place - kind of like a mini zoo. Riley and I had been there before, but taking Kendle was a whole new experience. She LOVES animals, so this was right up her alley. Morgan on the other hand would have been happy to run amok and grab handfuls of the gravel by the pathways, but I digress. In the outdoor exhibits we got a close up of Sea Otters swimming and grooming themselves. Fun fact: they spend the majority of their time grooming themselves, they are very vain animals - HA! Even Morgan got a kick out of them speeding through the water and floating on their backs. They were really hamming it up. Some other outdoor highlights were the octopus (which freaked Kendle out) and the bird aviary was pretty neat. I'm usually not a big bird person, but this exhibit allows you to get right up close to them in the water and watch them dive and swim.

The indoor exhibits were a lot of fun too. The Passages of the Deep, are what they are really famous for. You get to walk through tunnels of sea life, and one in particular of sharks. The feeling of having sharks swim over your head is pretty surreal. I could literally have sat there for hours.

We made our way through the rest of the indoor portion and Kendle's favorite stop was the tide pool exhibit where she got to touch different creatures and also they had a huge glass sphere with jelly fish inside. Did you know jellyfish are 95% water? Fun fact we learned. All in all, it was money well spent and other than Morgan trying to bust out of his stroller the whole time it was great.

After that we headed to Agate Beach State Park. It is right outside of Newport and it's probably been about seven years or so since I've been there and in that time the beach had developed some big sand dunes. So it took a little hike to get close to the water. The weather was not too bad though, just a bit windy. We had an awesome time there, the kids played and played and would have stayed there forever. Riley helped Kendle build a sandcastle fort and Morgan found a stick he tried to knock it down with. His little legs needed some good running around. We were wet, sandy, and loving it! I took about 100 pictures while we were there, here are some of my fav's:

We were exhausted and REALLY hungry, so after going back to the hotel and cleaning up we made a straight line for some dinner. To please all the picky eaters in our family we went to Izzy's and let me tell you, we got our money's worth. There is something about that ocean air that makes you feel like you could eat a horse.

Kendle made sure that after dinner we waited exactly a half-hour before we went swimming. I think I have unintentionally passed some of my paranoia onto my daughter. I opted to stay in our room with the Morgster who was really exhausted from the long day. I think everyone was in bed by 9:30. Too much fun makes for a tired family!