Wow, Keith and I have been married for 35 years!!!! March 14, 1975 - 2010.
Because Keith works in Torrence, California one week out of every month we decided I would meet him there in March and spend the weekend together to celebrate our anniversary. He picked me up at the LAX airport and we stayed Thursady night with my brother Neil who lives in Northridge. We really enjoyed our time with him. We ate at his restaurant (Pampas Cafe) YUMMY and had a great time enjoying his beautiful yard - it was so nice to be in the warm weather where people are mowing their lawns and the flowers are in bloom and the trees are all green. Spending time with Neil was good for me. Hope he enjoyed our visit as much as we did. We actually came back and spent Saturday night with him too.
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What a needed change from the drab of winter. On Friday we left for the coast. I love watching the ocean and being at the edge of the land. The day we were there it was clear we even got to watch the sun set on the ocean, an amazing sight.
We went on a whale watching boat excursion. I was so nervous to go on the ocean in a boat because the last time I did I just barfed the whole trip so needless to say I wasn't too excited. As it turned out the ocean was very calm, the boat was big, wide and very powerful so it could cut through the waves easily.
Amazingly and thankfully the time on the boat was delightful.
We saw hundreds of common dolphins, they were so fun because there were so many of them to see at once. They would jump out of the water and it was almost like they were chasing the boat. They litterally would be so close I thought the boat was going to hit them. Enjoy the video, you can see how smooth the ocean was. It was so fun to see these graceful creatures in the ocean. They seemed so playful and there were so many of them.
Over the years I have seen many pictures, postcards, jewlery etc etc of a whale's tail fin and never really understood why that was such a cool thing. Well now I KNOW! Seeing these huge animals come up for air then roll and dive down into the ocean to feed with the last sight of them being water falling off their unique tail fin was breathtaking. These pictres are ones I found on the internet that very closely resemble what we saw only closer up. Our pictures a bit too far away so to let you see better what we saw we used these instead. We saw two different sighting of whales. First the humpback whales, then the gray whales. They can identify the humback whales by markings on their tail fins. We were told it is like our fingerprint, each one is unique. We could tell when they were surfacing because of the mist of water they blow up when they are exhaling as they come up for air before rolling then going back down to feed. There were two of them and once we saw the two dive at the same time so two tail fins at once was cool. The next post shows a gray whale and their barnacles.
We actually saw the oil rigs like the one in the picture but the best was the water falling off the fin right before the whale went back into the ocean. And to think I couldn't find a spoon with a whale tail fin on it.
These were feeding close to the surface so they came back up about every two mintues. This was great because they sometimes stay down for 20 minutes or longer so we saw them surface, blow, roll and dive waving to us with their famous tail fin lots of times. It was absolutley amazing to see in person something you usually only see in pictures. We never saw them leap out of the water, just roll but that was still incredible.
After the humbacks we went around one of the Channel Islands (Anacapa) and saw a huge cluster of sea lions. Again it was neat to see them in their ocean habitat rather than at Sea World . We were really glad they took us around this island because we had planned to go out to this island the next day and hike to it's summit (154 stairs) but the next day the weather was bad and the trip was canceled. We had a certificate from our hotel so the boat company gave us a gift certificate to use within a year so I guess we'll be going back. But on our way back to the shore we saw the gray whales. Again there werew two of them a mother and her baby. These whales are brong weighing a ton and gain almost 100 lbs a day. The mother secretes her milk into the water and the baby gulps it just like it is feeding on ocean life. Talk about rich mother's milk. It was almost unbelievable to witness these animals in the ocean.
Because we couldn't go on the island tour on Saturday we went to the Ronald Reagan library and museum and saw the retired, completely restored Airforce One airplne that the Presidents use.
It was a very interesting museum and President Reagan was a people's president always had a smile on his face plus he was an honest, hard working politician. His wife Nancy Reagan was not only beautiful and gracious but such a support to him in the White House. What a good thing is was to see them married and enjoying their life together even with so much public and so little private time. We learned a lot about his life and all he accomplished. There is a piece of the Berlin Wall there and again all the spring flowers, plam trees and green grass made it even better.
They have a completely accurate replica of the oval office which was fun to see.
On our drive back to Neil's we bought some fresh picked strawberries and oranges.
