Aquarium

Saturday morning, we decided to leave the last two days of soaring valley heat behind and retreat to the coast. Doug and I are planners, so it was a little liberating to just pack up and go with little thought before-hand. We had purchased a Groupon for the Aquarium earlier this summer and it expires in a couple of weeks, so we thought we'd better put the house projects on hold for a day and go use it. Instead of making the almost 6 hour round-trip in a day, like we had originally planned, we booked a last-minute room and headed out.


It was incredibly gorgeous at the beach when we arrived (and much cooler than 95°), so we immediately took the kids down to the beach to let them run off their wiggles from the car ride. Evie wanted to fly the kite, so Dad helped her get it set up and she did pretty well.








The boys just wanted to run and slide down the dunes and find treasures.


Hylton thought it was especially fun to makes trails in the sand with seaweed.




There are four little people down on the right that belong to me. Doug was able to let the kite string out all the way at one point... until it all crashed. I think it brought out his inner boy. He spent quite a while playing with it until Hylton fell in a rivulet and a lady carried him through the water to me, and then Sterling and Evie ran off into the waves and Doug had to run after them before they got swept out. It was actually quite terrifying. They were duly chastised and we decided to call it a day after that.


We drove through downtown Newport in search of dinner. The sunset on the bay was so pretty to see.


After parking, we heard the growls of sea lions, so we walked across the road to the pier and found the Sea Lion Disentanglement Cage where the sea lions can recover after being caught in fishing nets.








I'm not exactly sure why we chose a pub for our dinner, except that it looked like the cleanest place we could see. Our waitress was really grumpy and we waited for quite a while. We were all starving!


Doug and Sterling thought it would be funny if Sackperson sampled the local ale. Boys!


Little Miss Sassy and Daddy. He was appalled to find that my purse was on the floor, so he held it in his lap for the rest of dinner. I asked him if he wanted to sanitize the bottom of it with hand sanitizer- I'm kind of surprised he refused.


After a crazy night where we went to bed late with three kids in one bed and Doug and I in the other (and Doug feeling nauseous), and then ended up with Hylton between for the rest of the night (I don't know how Evie and Sterling scored that victory) with his tiny little feet wedged into my back, we checked-out of the room and went to breakfast.


Evie LOVED her strawberry crêpes and, after licking all the whipped cream off the top, ate them all up before we knew it.




The sea lions were being fed right after we arrived at the Aquarium, so we went and found a good viewing spot. The trainers had them do all sorts of tricks and jumps off the rocks and it may have been the best part of the Aquarium (except maybe the actual underwater aquarium).








It was fun to go adventuring, but it's never relaxing with kids. I came home way more tired than when we left- we were all in bed by 8pm last night! It was probably good to go do something fun before the baby comes, though.