At the Beach

On day three of Anna's visit we went on a journey to a large forest and the beach. Anna had been craving a NW forest so we tried to find a good one. We decided to stop at Tillamook Forest on our way to Tillamook cheese factory and the beach. We went to the forestry center where Max and I had never been. Another free and exciting outing!

 After exploring the forestry center for a little bit, we went outside for a nature walk and to throw rocks in the river. 

 And then, those two adorable kids started holding hands and didn't want to let go. Form the look on their faces, I would think they were pretty excited about this.

 Exploring leaves, they still didn't want to let go of each other....

The cutest ever.

 June was a natural at throwing rocks in the river, Charlie wanted to dive in...makes for one nervous mama on the rocky shore.

 After exploring part of Tillamook forest we went and stopped at a grocery store for lunch then onto the cheese factory.

We watched them make cheese, ate some samples, and ate some delicious Tillamook ice cream cones.


And then, to the best part of all. We went to the beach expecting rain and mentally preparing ourselves for cold wind and being completely covered. We were pleasantly surprised with, perfect weather, partly blue skies (much more optimistic than saying partly cloudy right?) and the whole beach to ourselves!

Charlie loved running into the water and he probably wouldn't have stopped running if we didn't make him. June would walk up to the wave then run when it got close. After Charlie was playing in the water for a little bit we noticed he kept tripping, we realized his feet were probably numb so it was time to take a break in the dry sand. We went through this cycle about 3 times. Each time he started tripping when his feet got numb. 

 After some great fun hours at the beach, we decided we needed to get some food. First we were going to stop by Captain Dan's Pirate Pastry shop because it was closed when we went to the beach for our anniversary but it ended up being closed again. Weird random beach hours. Oh well, we will have to try a 3rd time some day. We then went to Mo's for some clam chowder and a view of the sea otters.

 After dinner we walked on the pier to get a better view of the sea otters before the long drive home. Luckily the babies did pretty well on the drive home despite being a little sleep deprived and it being past their bedtime.

On the last day of Anna's visit we decided to go to the zoo, mostly because Anna wanted to see more sea otters! Apparently the Oregon zoo has sea otters and river otters, which I never knew the difference. We got a good look at the river otters and a couple of other animals before a horrendous cloud burst. We then saw some sea lions and the area where the sea otters would be but they must have been hiding since it was so rainy.

 We decided to leave a little early since we were all soaked. This left us enough time to go to the Original Pancake House for lunch before the kids had to take naps and then we had to take them back to the airport.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I didn't have a voice at all this day? I started to lose it when we were driving back from the beach and it was pretty much gone by the next day.

We got back to the house and let the kids take quick naps while we cleaned up a bit. Then we woke them up and it was off to the airport to see our good friends leave us. The drive to the airport was a whole other exciting (stressful) experience. The freeway was completely backed up so we found an alternate route with the GPS. It turned out that all of the power was out in NW Portland including stop lights. This caused a lot of traffic and we were both worried Anna would miss her flight. We would have been happy to keep them another day or two (or more) but it would have been pretty expensive to change the flight and she had gone days without seeing her husband, (and June not seeing her dad) so she was pretty excited to be reunited as a family. After being stuck in traffic for awhile, Anna decided to say a little silent prayer, immediately the traffic lights worked where we were and traffic started moving... This girl has powerful prayers, (she is the same friend that fasted and prayed for us after we had two miscarriages and what do you know, along came Charlie...) Seriously we couldn't have been blessed with a better friend. Anyway, we made it to the airport just in time, she was also blessed with not-too-long lines and after a good sprint, they made it onto the airplane and had a whole row to themselves.

We really feel so blessed to have such amazing friends, and a great prospect for Charlie's future wife. We will be happy to have Anna's family visit anytime and we hope to have Buck come too in the future.

And let's not forget about all these amazing photos that Anna took!

Also, if you haven't read about the first half of Anna's visit, keep reading below.