Day 8 Bye, Bye Ocean

The day started out very early as Darrin & I got up and left the kids sleeping in the hotel room. We drove over to Cannon Beach to explore the tide pools at the very low tide. (For the record, we offered to take any kid who wanted to go with us, but they all chose to sleep!)
It was VERY foggy and we almost went back to bed, but decided to just go for it. Fortunately, the fog was MUCH thinner over in Cannon Beach:


There were TONS of sea stars on the exposed rocks!

Darrin & I really enjoyed walking around taking pictures:

We got back to the hotel room at about 7:45 and Callie & I went down to the beach to collect specimens for her to look at under the microscope when we got home. The fog was SO thick in Seaside that for a while we couldn't see the water OR the beachside buildings. No other humans, either. Just sand, fog, and the two of us! We gathered different kinds of sand, seaweed, shells, seawater, even a dead jellyfish! (Maybe some other time I'll post microscope pictures. Not today - I'm doing enough today!)

As Callie & I walked back to the hotel at about 9, I realized it wasn't even 9 am and I'd been to TWO beaches that day!
We packed up the car, checked out of the hotel and hit the road for home. Drove straight through Portland and up into the Columbia River Gorge. Our first stop was Multnomah Falls, a beautiful waterfall in a small creek just before it joins the Columbia. There are two falls, a thin tall one with a smaller, wider one below. There is an 80 year old concrete bridge between the two. Here is the lower falls and bridge:

And the upper falls: (I don't have a wide enough lens to get the whole thing in one shot.)

We hiked up to the bridge. Brynn wouldn't go out on the bridge, but she did a lot of looking for pillbugs on the trail on the way up. Didn't find any. We were beginning to wonder if Oregon had pillbugs!

We found a spot to have a picnic near the Multnomah Falls parking lot. Other than the staff, we were the only picnickers! Turned out the picnic spot was right next to some busy train tracks!

Fortunately, the kids thought it was cool (and not scary) so it turned out fine. Darrin & Kyra ran to the car to get the picnic stuff, and Brynn did even more pill bug hunting. And had SUCCESS!

Turns out they DO have pillbugs in Oregon! Brynn says they are redder
than the ones in Utah, and have pointier ends as well.
After lunch, we headed to the fish hatchery at Bonneville Dam. They had these HUGE sturgeon! As in 10 feet long and 450 pounds of fish! This is Herman, the biggest and fattest:

I wish there had been some way to give some scale to the picture because it doesn't really show how big he is!
In another pond, there were some ducks diving for food and it was SO clear you could see them under the water as they fed.

The kids loved seeing all the fish they were hatching at the hatchery. (If only our friends, the Hatches were there, we could have had lots of fun wordplay!)

Next we moved over to the Bonneville Dam. It's right near the hatchery, but the hatchery is on the bank of the river, and the dam visitor's center is on an island in the middle of the river. At this visitor's center, they have windows into a fish ladder that are 4 stories underground. One window had a couple of lamprey eels latched on to it!

We saw all kinds of fish swim by, ranging in size from smaller than my pinky nail to larger than Brynn!

And this, my friends, is the best dam picture I could get: (har, har, har)

After we left the dam, we drove and drove and drove, then stopped at Jack in the Box for dinner, then drove and drove and drove and finally arrived in Baker City, OR where we stayed the night in a motel. And watched Olympics.