Monterey

Tuesday 6th August - today we are in Monterey, a small fishing harbour about 100 miles south of San Francisco.  It is renowned for having loads of butterflies (we did not see that many) and we came across this house.

We reckon it makes the houses in Pennywell who still have their Christmas lights up in June look like complete ameteurs!

In our last night in Monterey, we ate at Bubba Gumps, the girls thought it would be funny to tell the waiter that it was my birthday (well it nearly was). So after we finished eating the whole staff of the restaurant encircled our table and sang this wacky happy birthday song.  Even I was embarrassed.

Victoria thought it was very funny!

Lobas Point

Monday 5th August - Today we went to Point Lobas state park, it had Ben recommended to us by my aunty, who said it was a very beautiful.  She was right, basically it is a peninsula that sticks out into the sea and it has to be the best place I have been to for photographs.  Everywhere you looked there was an amazing view.  On the beach we saw more seals and sea otters, they were very noisy.  We had a picnic on the beach and the seal became curious and cam quite close to the shore, I think they like Cheetos too!  Here is just one of the many pictures that we took yesterday.

You probably cannot make it out but the island in the middle of this picture has some seals on it!

Whales ahoy!

It is my birthday - 4th August 2013 - Today Samantha, Victoria and I went whale watching in the Bay of Monterey. The picture below shows the boat that we went out on.

We had booked this a few weeks ago back in the UK, we were advised that it would be cold and choppy, which ruled Jules out of the trip.  We arrived at 8:30am ready for our 4 hour trip.  When they said it would be cold and choppy they were correct, although it was a fairly still day there was quite a swell when we got out of the harbour.  We spotted hundreds of birds such as brands cormorants, sooty shearwaters, guilemots also we saw loads of sea otters, and seals.

After about two hours of looking for whales we came across a pair of humpback whales, they we feeding on anchovies.  This meant that they would dive down for about 5 minutes at a time and then come up to breath. There were about 4 boats circling around where these whales were diving, we have some cool photos to show you, also you can't believe how loud they are when they spray the water up, you can hear it from miles away.  On the way back we found a pod of dolphins about 200 strong and got some got photos of these as they came quite near to the boat, see below.