About My Vacation

Yes, I'm going to bore you with vacation pictures. (groan) I was going to do this earlier, but I've been working hard to catch up, and I don't know where the time has gone. I have been going through all the pictures I took and getting them ready to put on the web, so there are plenty of those, and, just in case you're worried, no, I'm not going to get to all of them today. You can look forward to vacation pictures trickling in here little by little for a long time to come!

As you know, we went to California to go camping with my family in the Redwoods. We drove. It's about 14 hours from here to Sacramento, across a few mountains and a lot of dessert, and the part that seems the slowest is crossing the salt flats. If you have never seen the salt flats, here's what you're missing:



My kids thought that this looked a lot like a beach, since they had never seen an actual beach before. Well, we were going to California so why not take them to the beach, right? Well, we did, but not yet. Before going to the beach we met up with my penpal, Gwen, at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. If you just want to see the stuff they have there, look at their website, and if you have a chance to go, do - we all liked it a lot. A couple of the more interesting things we did there were:



Feeding the batrays, and



we got to see what we might look like as a penguin family.

Here's the whole lot of us on the beach:



That's me and Mark and our kids, Gwen and her kids, and my sister, Angela, with her husband, Joe, and their baby, Andrei, in no particular order.

More Aquariums

I don't know if I have mentioned it before or not, but Mark is a Scuba diver so of course he is into all this water stuff. We have plenty of indoor pets besides all the outdoor ones, but only two of them were water creatures.



Here they are. After looking at aquariums so much, we had to get more water creatures, so after we got home we got this:



We're still adding fish to it little by little. We talked about finding a new home for the turtle and the goldfish and using their tank to set up a new aquarium, but it turns out that we were more attached to them than we thought. In the process of populating the new tank, the turtle and goldfish have gained roommates also - four snails and a second fish. I can't remember what it is called, but it eats the same food as goldfish, and it is very pretty - silver with gold and black spots and long, beautiful fins, and big dark black eyes. I don't seem to have a picture of these new additions yet.

Remember to keep coming back to see more vacation pictures, including camping and the redwood trees. They really are incredible trees! More later...