Oregon

We all know the story about Lewis and Clark. But did you know they traveled with a Newfoundland dog? I didn't. And I like this breed because my friend Ashley has one, McKinley. We traveled with my parents after they picked us up from the airport in Portland to Astoria, OR a really neat town traveling by ferry just to get there. We stayed in a crappy motel because we didn't know there was a huge car show there and all of the hotels were full, not realizing we could have stayed in this hotel for a mere $400.00 a night. The next day we hit up Lewis and Clark's final stopping point on their trip across the united states. It's definitely amazing to see how much they had to do every time they stopped, like build a fort with sleeping quarters and eating/work areas. And just to imagine what they thought the first time they saw the ocean.

The Pacific ocean is nothing like the Atlantic. It's not the type of place you would think about when you imagine yourself getting a tan at the beach. We arrived to DePoe Bay, our relaxation point for the next 7 days. The ocean was a powerful surge of rough waves that crashed against the rocks like thunder.

I won't go into the specifics of what we did each day (mainly because I can't remember and mainly we did a whole lot of relaxing!) But here are some of the highlights:

Blair and the Giant Tree
by Lewis and Clark's final stopping point.

Our first view of the Pacific Ocean. Some of the swells were at least 10ft. tall
We saw several spouting horns
(surge of water that sprays up through openings in a surface)
that sprayed up around 25 or 30 ft high.

We depicted Oregon as "the Arkansas of the West".
It seemed they were far behind in music, fashion, and technology.

Our condo had ocean front view. So beautiful.
We saw whales every day right out living room
and we even saw sea lions and a seal!

View from a lookout point.
I couldn't stop taking pictures of the ocean.

A Grey Squirrel who posed for a picture.

Lighthouse that I toured.
(Some people are afraid of heights.)

I also realize this falls into the category of "lighthouse growing out of shoulder" from Emily's list of things not to do.

A view from one of our many hikes.

A typical face and the vast green hillside of Oregon's many
ocean mountains as I like to call them.

Audrey (my niece)
She's getting so big!
Except she still only weighs about 20lbs.

A small spouting horn.

The Hobbit Trail--definitely recommend good shoes.

Where the Hobbit Trail ended.
We had the beach to ourselves.
It was also in a Tsunami warning zone.

Sea lions hanging out on a buoy from our whale watching excursion.

The whales came within 10ft of our boat. At one time we had 3 whales in about a 25 foot radius of us. Our guide said they are approximately 50ft long and 60-80,000 pounds. HUGE!

Whale tail!

Whale coming right for us! I'm pretty sure he swam under our boat though we couldn't see much through the water.

We went to the Aquarium (one of the top 10 in the US) for Audrey. I didn't take many pictures, it was raining and most of the exhibits were outdoors. Sea stars come in a variety of colors; red, orange, pink, blue. Deep water star fish are squishy, shallow are hard. I'm pretty sure Audrey's favorite though were the sea otters, she couldn't get enough! Though her new word is Octopus (Och-pus).

Tillamook, Oregon has the largest cheese factory in the state.

The cheese is tasty and the ice cream too!

Audrey's fake smile anytime she sees a camera!

Audrey kisses.

I wish I would have gotten her doing "I'm a little teapot" because it's super cute. It's not really a teapot though, it's more like a sugar bowl because she has 2 handles.
I've also learned a lot more sign language because of her--banana, shoes, book, cat, bird, more, please, thank you, turtle, fish, and dog. Yup, those will definitely come in handy.....

Another view from our condo.
Oregon is definitely pretty.

I realize there were a lot of pictures to go through, but we were also gone for about 9 days. We had a lot of free time too, playing with Audrey and watching movies. It was a great trip with my family and now it's back to the real world.

A condo update: we listed our condo the day we left for Oregon and had 3 showings while we were gone-- 2 seem promising! Hopefully we'll know more next week.