(I was going to draw little comics again, but I sort of got lazy and decided to just bombard this post with pictures)
Our tale ended previously with our hungover trip to Morro Bay where we played with fellow sea creatures (aka statues of sea creatures) and watched a lot of Animal Cops (because it satiates my thirst for justice).
Morro Rock, a 581 foot tall mass made of hardened magma. I just learned that it serves as a peregrine falcon preserve. The more you know.
That night I was incredibly sick, but the next morning I awoke feeling a little bit better. We got up early and managed to head out by eight so that we could arrive in Monterey bay just as the aquarium was opening. The drive there was truly uneventful, just me driving while everyone else napped a little bit. You have two choices when it comes to leaving Cayucos: you can either take the long way around the hills through Cambria and then reach Highway 46 a full hour later OR you can take Old Creek Road. Old Creek Road is a beautiful but eerie winding road that travels through the forests and hills that separate the rest of California from the central coast. It cuts travel time in half, and would have been the way to get to the beach house that first night if it weren't for the pouring rain and pitch blackness. There are portions of that road that line sheer cliffs, and if you aren't careful, you could seriously jettison yourself off one of these drop-offs and land your car in the reservoir below. So this road is serious business. I've always been awed and afraid of it, especially since the fog that covers most of the surrounding Cayucos area in the morning usually never quite goes away on Old Creek Road, and there are only a few farmhouses. The rest of it is completely isolated. We decided that a good new name for it should be Wolfman Wind, because Old Creek Road is the perfect place for wolfmen to play.
The rest of the ride was basically me willing myself to stay awake and to pay attention to road signs, since this trip was a good experience for me to start trusting road signs and google maps to lead me to my destination. I also learned that I probably should not trust my own instincts on which direction to go, because twice upon leaving Monterey I was convinced that we needed to go in the opposite direction that we needed to go. It was especially obvious when I thought we needed to go east when in fact we wanted to go west, TOWARDS THE OCEAN.
Once we arrived at Monterey Bay, we parked in the all inclusive parking garage that cost us each our first-borne child to park in. We immediately embarked on a mission to find someplace to eat. We found Louie Linguine. It was decent food, we really only ended up getting pizza there because it was one of the first things we stumbled upon and it overlooked the ocean.
So thrilled, so thrilled
Louie Linguine looked like such a charmingly lovely man, I wish I could have met him.
p.s. here is a picture of me looking at sea lions with a telescope
When we were done with lunch, we went to the aquarium. My aunt and uncle both work there, so we got in FO FWEE :D Always a plus. They met us by the otter tank so that my uncle (who is in charge of husbandry) could show us around behind the scenes.
Otters! Baby Kit on the left and Toola on the right. At one point when we were walking past the tank during a show, the trainer said, "Kit is our darkest otter!" which was hilarious to us (since we have that friend who is, you know, named Kit).
My uncle first showed us the octopi. Both aunt and uncle have worked at the aquarium since I was a wee lass, so I have been able to play with the octopi before. Back when they were younger, they would get really animated when visitors showed up, pulsating different colors and wrapping their tentacles around your arms so tightly that sometimes you got sucker hickeys :) They are getting older, however, and were less apt to be interested in us. Just touching an octopus feels so cool though, and is definitely an awesome experience, so we all felt his suckers and stroked his head before he curled up into a tiny ball in his cave. All that sounded really dirty. Scott (uncle) showed us the crabs next door and then took us to see the temporary holding tank for Outer Bay outside the aquarium. Outer Bay is a giant tank that usually houses their sunfish, tuna, sharks (white sharks if they have them at the time), sea turtles, and a variety of other fish. Unfortunately, it was down for repair when we were there :( We did get to see the tuna and full-grown sunfish, however, and their mahi-mahi (which are really beautiful colors). Then we saw their juvenile sunfish, who was...a bit mentally challenged it seemed, and the sea turtles, Sunny and Azul. They are also quite slow (in a mental capacity sort of way). They are so cute though. The aquarium is implementing puffins as well as a lone auklet into their collection of seabirds, so we got to see those cuties for a few minutes. Scott then asked me what else I wanted to see and I could only think of one thing: Makana. Makana is a Laysan Albatross brought to the aquarium because she has a broken wing and thus cannot fly ever again. This makes it impossible for her to live in the wild, so she remains at the aquarium for education purposes. She's the only albatross on display in the world and she is so darling. I love her. Last year I volunteered with aviculture at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and fell in love with Makana, so of course she was the only one I wanted to see. Scott handed us off to Traci (aunt) since he had a meeting to go to and we went to visit Makana. I was so excited to see her and Eric (the head aviculturist) said that I could come up and say hi to her. Just as we made eye contact and I reached out to her, her two favorite people in the world walked through the door opposite of me. She turned around and refused to have anything else to do with me as soon as she caught sight of them :( I was really disappointed since they can see her every day and I haven't seen her for an entire year. Oh well. Traci took us to the jellyfish lab, where they play God and grow different jellies for exhibits. Last year I was obsessed with boxing the moon jellyfish, which is basically where you poke the tops of the jellies and watch them float down, then struggle back to the surface, at which point you poke them down again. This seems cruel, and it probably would be if jellies had brains. Moon jellyfish stingers are also incredibly low-key (unless you're allergic to them), so there's no chance of getting hurt while boxing the jellies. I told everyone else about this, including my aunt (who thought it was funny), and we spent a little bit of time doing it.
At this point, we said goodbye to my aunt, who had to go to a Makana escape drill (called Makanassance). We then set out to explore the rest of the aquarium.
The Black Oystercatcher is my favorite.
Snowy Plovers are most definitely next.
From here on out are Claire's aquarium pictures. I foolishly forgot my camera cable and, since I was taking a lot of videos at the beginning of the trip, my camera ran out of room for more pictures.
There were so many creeper fish that just sat and stared at you from the corner of the tank. One fish was just a few feet in, right at eye level, staring at us open-mouthed. I love fish.
Wolf Eel. We called him the Old Man of the Sea. He probably sits out on his sea-equivalent of a rocking chair and yells at the young'n fish for messing around on his lawn.
Claire was in love with the penguin.
I partied with the penguin.
Once we had seen everything, we browsed the gift shop for awhile and then decided to go home. Before we arrived at the car, however, we saw a shop REVOLVING ENTIRELY AROUND OTTERS!
My brother.
I let Kristen drive us home and we playmaginated all the way home. Our session mostly revolved around Dieter Laser, an actor who I have only seen in the terrible movie The Human Centipede. For some reason, he is hilarious to me, and I imagine him as this lonely loser who everyone shuns because he has this mental illness where he needs everything to be in threes. Cue us making everything into THREECAR or THREEROCK or BURTHREETO! Once we arrived home, we stocked up on some more alcohol and DRANK. We made whiskey sodas, which I hated, but dutifully sucked down. We watched some more Animal Planet, though this time it was a show called Fatal Attraction, which I adored because it was about crazy people who thought they were basically animals and then the animals attack them. Every encounter with a creature from that point on for me was a FATAL ATTRACTION. We went for another night time walk on the beach where we saw shooting stars and the lights from Morro Bay through the fog. The ocean at night is an amazing thing.
The next day was basically just a beachventure day. We got up around late morning and went for a really long walk on the beach. It was cleansing to just be able to walk and walk in the foggy, crisp morning air and feel the waves and splash around in the ocean. I misjudge distances, but I would say we walked for two miles before we turned back. We chased birds, we ran around, we jumped over the waves, and we collected seashells. By the time we'd returned to the stairs, all of my pockets were stuffed full of pretty shells. My favorite we collected were these beautiful butterfly shells that are the shells of tiny mussels, the insides of which are iridescent and rainbow. At this point I asked the others to carry my shells back to the house for me while Maddie and I walked the other way down the beach towards the Cayucos Pier. Our goal was to reach the swings, but the tide came in and cut us off, so we instead dawdled by the cutoff point and then headed back. We seriously failed at timing when high tide was verses low tide (aka I failed).
Once back at the house we showered and changed into comfy clothes so we could watch a barrage of horror movies that Maddie had brought. We watched Carrie and Swimfan, though we stopped in the middle of Swimfan because we had to stock up on some more alcohol and I wanted to make a sandcastle at sunset. I wanted to make a sandcastle and put candles in it, so it looked lit up from inside, but I couldn't open the door to the garage (where all of the sandcastle supplies are) and the only candles we could find were birthday candles. So we went down to the beach and saw that the sunset was gorgeous. Absolutely breathtaking.
So of course we decided to take some pictures.
Waterbenders
After a long while of taking pictures of each other with the glimmering silver ocean as our backdrop, we made a birthday cake/sandcastle. We made an epic moat for it, as well as towers made of sticks and strung with seaweed. Then we put candles in it and tried to light them, but it was far too windy. So then we abandoned this idea and wrote stuff in the sand with sticks. Then we ran around again. Light was fading quickly, and the heavy rains had created makeshift rivers in the sand. As I tried to herd Claire into our "trapdoor" we had created in the sand, I myself fell victim to a real trapdoor. My foot caught a ledge from one of these sand rivers and I face-planted. All of my weight slammed into my right knee, which I have fallen on several times in my life, and one more time does not do it any favors. I started to sob, surprised and feeling almost betrayed by the fact that I had tripped. I immediately ran out to sea to make myself feel better, which greatly confused Claire and Maddie. Once I was done feeling sorry for myself, I limped back up to the beach house and we commenced BURRITO NIGHT!
1000 Ways to Die was on, one of our other favorite shows, which I watched while Maddie and Claire made a Cake Boss video in the kitchen, only with burritos. After burritos, we started drinking again. A lot. I drank a lot of shitty vodka, mixed with both orange juice and Dr. Shasta (which we'd picked up at the grocery store earlier that day and finished up that night). We all got super trashed.
This kind of just explains it all
This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip
I was the gazelle, fleeing from King Leopard
There was a picture of Maddie and I being cows because, at one point on Fatal Attraction, there was a story about how cows killed some man. And we were in awe because cows have no sharp horns or fangs or claws. They have trample power though.
We danced a bit, I fell a lot on my injured knee, we went out on the porch in the rain to talk some more and had more drunken heart to hearts. We texted a lot of people we probably shouldn't have. The funniest thing ever happened. I sent my brother a picture of a sea turtle at midnight that I never remembered sending. Oh good times. We also apparently watched an entire movie that I don't remember for the life of me, and I only know this because I was looking at Claire's camera the next morning. Maddie took a barrage of pictures of herself in a sunhat and the TV screen as it played the movie. All in all, it was an incredibly successful drunken night, complete with cuddling.
The final book in the series (these are seriously turning into novels), SPRING BREAK BEACHAPALOOZA PART THREE! IN WHICH MADDIE TURNS 21 AND I FAIL AT LIFE BECAUSE I'M A GIMP! coming to a store near you!
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