The MOST Fun!

Well this summer has been absolutely amazing! I gave you an update the middle of July but boy do I have more stories now!
So, the first thing (I think, it's all starting to run together) is I took a very last minute trip to Seattle over the 24th of July. I decided I wanted to go Monday night, bought my ticket tuesday night and flew out Wednesday! It was so much fun (as always)! Erika had to work Thursday morning so I decided to go to the lake by her house and practice my photog skills with her sweet SLR (whom we have affectionately named "Jake"). I took a ton of pics and like three of them turned out pretty sweet. Here is a sampling...





Friday we went on a nice little hike up to Heather Lake. It was still covered in snow but it was gorgeous! The mountains, all the little rivers and falls, the lake, and all the green...I love it up there!






On Saturday we were having a hard time deciding what the heck we wanted to do and got the sudden idea to go up to the San Juan Islands again. I went up there in March and I loved it, they are just so beautiful with the mountains right on the ocean what more could you want? This time we thought it might be fun to try some sea kayaking and maybe see some Orca Whales (july-august is a good season). So, we headed on up there and found a sweet campsite on a gorgeous beach and went sea kayaking.

Kayaking was a lot of hard work (i thought for sure I wouldn't be able to move my arms for days but they were actually okay) and really fun. We didn't even get close to seeing whales but we ate some bull kelp (nasty!) and saw some starfish and birds and stuff. It must have been a sight to see Erika and I paddling this way and that trying to get from one place to the next!


We built a sweet fire on the beach when we got back only to find out just as the flames were catching that the beach had just closed :(. We coninced the nice ranger guy to let us stay til eleven so we got to have a sweet fire on the beach all to ourselves!
I slept horribly that night cuz I forgot how cold WA is even in the dead of summer and I froze my butt off! So the next morning I woke up and said "Hey, lets go see some whales!" So we tore down camp, ran down to the shop, bought our tickets for the boat, and headed on out. We went out on a pretty big boat from Anacortes and had to travel about an hour and a half each way to get to where the whales were up off the Canadian Shore.
So just to educate you a bit the whales are named by alphabetical pods and J-Pod is a resident pod of that area meaning they pretty much stay there all year round (some whales are complete nomads). Orca Whales live about 120 years or so and the oldest one they know of is Ruffles from the J-pod who is estimated to have been born in like 1909 or something crazy like that. They stay with the pod they are born into but they don't have a lot of babies in their lifetime so their pods don't get too big.
Anyways, it was the most incredible thing ever to see these whales in the wild. I was expecting the usual Sea World stuff but no way, this was just incredible. The whales were so huge first of all and very graceful and playful. They were just chasing each other around, surfing the waves, breaching, chasing fish. They got really close to us and swam under the boat and everything. It was definitely a lot more excitement than I had anticipated and I would recommend that anyone who ever gets the chance to go whale watching definitely should! We were going crazy watching all these whales and trying to get the best pictures ever but they were hard to capture on camera so these will have to suffice. (This is Ruffles).

Sadly, I had to return home after that. Erika is moving back home to Utah next week which I am really excited about but I am definitely going to miss our fun adventures together in Washington.