June

Before it becomes an uncontrollable amount of pictures, I had probably better post what we have been up to this month so far. I feel as though I have hardly spent any time at home in June. (And the house looks it!) To start with, on June 5 we went to Newport, OR to see Johns brother Wes and his wife Kristen run the Newport marathon. This was Kristens first marathon, although she has been a runner for years. They brought one of our kids cousins, Dalton, with them, so we watched all the kids while they ran. The race started at Yaquina Head, looped through town and back to the start for the first 5k and then out along the bayfront road to Toledo and back. So we waited at the start for Wes and Kristen to come back through. Weirdly we ended up standing next to a family that was from Medford and are good friends with Kelly and Josh! it's amazing what a small world it really is.

Since we had some time to kill during the race, we took the kids down to play at the beach for a while. I was a beautiful day. Sunny and warm with just a very light breeze. A perfect day at the coast!

Some beach combing kids. Dalton left with a pretty full plastic grocery bag of 'treasures'.

After the beach we drove out to Toledo to the turn-around point to cheer on Wes and Kristen

Look at that! Sixteen miles in and still smiling! I am pretty sure I would have needed and ambulance before this point.

They had the bayfront road open to car traffic going into Newport so we took the slow route back and watched all the runners. Then we waited at the finish line for Wes and Kristen to come in.

Good job guys! We are proud of you!

Then it was off to........

I think the kids could have stayed there all day!

Besides the usual exhibits, they had just opened up a new one called Swampland. It was very cool!

They had several anaconda's, some crocodile's, a giant turtle, and lots of other smaller reptiles and swamp animals. It was really difficult to get a picture in there though because the lighting was so low you needed a flash which would reflect off the glass tank. I did manage to get a couple though.

Looking at the jellyfish.

Sea Lion tank.

O.k so this was really cool. The kids were standing at the tank window, and one sea lion kept circling the tank and then would swim up to the window and do a flip right up against the window in front of the kids. And he did it over and over as long as we were standing there. The kids could not stop laughing, they thought it was so fun.

We had a great trip. The kids were all very well-behaved. We drove home down the coast and cut across at Reedsport over to Sutherlin. Nice drive, not so windy and much prettier than going down I-5 the whole way.