Newport

Wow, what a weekend. You know, 4 days of adult time on it's own is fairly exciting, but when you get to spend it in a beautiful place on top of that, it's amazing. I love rain. I think it would take years of living in the Pacific Northwest to get sick of it. I guess you always want what you don't have. It was so beautiful there. I LOVE the green. Roger and I are ready to move!! We spent hours getting to Newport from Portland, just stopping at a bunch of different places along the coast.




So fun. On Friday we went to a few different places with Jessica and Jennifer. We went to the Yaquina Bay lighthouse. It was so neat. I personally didn't dare go all the way up. The stairs wound around and around inside and were metal grate. You could see all the way down. I stuck by the window you can see in the pic. Really neat anyway. One day I won't be afraid of heights, right?




Right by this lighthouse there is a place called Cobble Beach. It's not sand, it's a lot of black cobble stones. So cool. Even cooler was the seals that live on the rocks off the beach. There was a mom and a baby seal. There were great volunteers there telling us about the local seals. I don't know if you can see them in the picture, but the little grey baby is next to the white mom in the picture on the top left. The baby was born on Mothers Day. It was so sweet!! The mom was sleeping, then the baby kept tapping it, we thought it maybe wanted to play, then the mom finally woke up and fed it. Funny how the Mom instinct is everywhere in nature. There was another rock with a lot of seals hanging out all over it, then a few came out to play. There were also some fun tide pools with sea urchins and green anemones everywhere.




The marathon was a fun day. We met some great people at the dinner the night before, then there were some fun spectators to talk to at different points along the race. Funny how people come from all over for these things, though I can't blame them for driving a ways to this marathon, it was a beautiful course. I had planned on being able to hang out with Jennifer as she wasn't going to race because of an injury, but she couldn't but help run it when we were driving the course the night before and she saw how neat it was. It really was great getting to know others there as well. I even got to listen to the rantings of a Marathon Dad. I've seen them in other sports, but this new species was pretty fun to watch :) The group of Canadians I got to talk to for a while was used to Hockey Dad's, but thought he was a step beyond them even :)



Unfortunately the trip had to come to an end (though I was missing my kids pretty bad by this point so that was ok as well). Still there were a bunch of things we didn't do that would have been so fun. It was such a great trip. I got a pic of the marathon running Jones kids in their "Finisher" t-shirts. Also there are a couple of pictures of the Columbia River just East of Vancouver, WA. We had some time to kill before our flight left from Portland so we just went for a drive. We had been in a pretty, foresty, mountain drive, then came around a bend to this amazing view. So beautiful there!!

One more extra thanks to Taryn and Mom. I know Taryn had the crazy end of the deal. 8 kids, 7 and younger, is a big undertaking. I can't even express how grateful I am.

Hope everyone is having a fabulous day!!