Vacation 2015, #19 - Sea Lion Caves, Florence Oregon

You would think with all of the 2015 posts lately that we haven't done a dang thing yet in 2016 with it nearly 2/3 over, but that would be an incorrect thought!

So, I figured I should probably get last years vacation finished up before this year is over.

That brings us to Sea Lion Caves, which has an address of Florence Oregon, but it's a bit North of there and almost straight West of Eugene.  It seems that somebody had an ambitious idea for tourists to build a building on the edge of the bluff, I suppose you would call it, and then from the basement of that building, construct an elevator shaft down thru the earth that will deposit it's passengers into the sea lions' cave.

And that's exactly what that ambitious person did!

So this is the where you find yourself once the elevator reaches the bottom.  It's dark, humid and mostly beautiful with lots of sea lions laying around on the rocks.

These two up against the cage so crazies can't crawl out onto the rocks with the sea lions.

Some of the varmints up close and at least one swimming.

Once we got back up top, we hiked down a fairly long trail to a "look-out" where you could look down at the ocean and there was a curve in the "bluff" where you could see piles upon piles of sea lions resting on the rocks.  This is some of them.

There were a few on this out-cropping too, but more birds than sea lions.

This is a goofy pic but I liked it since you can barely see the curvature of the earth in the upper right corner.

This pic was from Molly's camera.

This one as well, documenting the hike I spoke of several photos back.  That little reddish roof about center is the look-out point to see the sea lions on the rocks down by the water.  Hiking down wasn't so bad.  Hiking up?  A bit of a different story...

And so it was.  Another day in the books.  I think we camped later on this evening but I cannot be sure as I did not journal things as I should have...

St. Louis, December 2015... I Forgot, Part III

So, I think we've finally made it to the final post about St. Louis and more directly, the final post about the City Museum. Oddly enough, since the first two post on this fantastic place, I've heard other adults talking about taking their own families there and how hard it is to describe it to people who haven't seen it themselves.

I agree.
 
And I agree even thought the rooftop stuff wasn't open to us when we were there in December.  Apparently, there's a ferris wheel and a few other various and sundry items that should be explored when the weather allows.

My concern about ever returning?  There are no St. Louis Rams to be found in that city now and I'm not sure that there are other reasons to return, other than breweries, of which, there are now quite a few.  We did not hit up Schlafly, even though they were not far off of our walk to the City Museum.  I did buy beers from several others with mixed results.  That, in and of itself, seems like a possible reason to return. 

Oh, and there's Cohokia Mounds not too far East over the Mississppi River from downtown.  Some cool history that should be explored.

And, if you're feeling like a drive, there is Elephant Rocks State Park about 1.5 hours South (and a touch West) of the Gateway Arch.  Cool place with mostly easy hiking.

And so on we go, thru the last of the city museum.

A disclaimer on their website states: "*Unaccompanied minors may be filled with sugar and returned*".
 

We finally found the room with the big slides.  You see, they purposefully do NOT give out maps of the place as they want you and your family to go exploring.  We did.  And, it took us many explorations to find the "slide room".

From the floor of the slide room looking up roughly 10/12 stories...

After climbing a pile of stairs, this is from somewhere around 5 - 7 stories up, looking down at another one of the donated pipe organs.  Much more cooler in person!!

I believe this was my peeps at the top of the 10 story slide, preparing themselves for, what I presume, imminent death, and smiling about it.

Robby at the bottom of such silliness...

What is this, you ask?  I have no idea, other than the bottom of some really high slides and a photo that absolutely refused to be rotated counter-clockwise.

The 5-story slides...

Really high up, looking down over slides onto a pipe organ that appears at the middle-top of the otherwise confusing picture.

Oh, and we haven't been outside until now.  Robby and dear ol' dad are several stories up when I took this pic. We're on our way to the airplane on a stick.

...and about 5 stories up here when I took this pic of the parking lot below the horse-poop in which I seemed to be willingly climbing in!!!

So Caleb and Momma kept their sensible feet closer to the ground.  Robby and dear ol' dad decided to keep going up thru tubes and tunnels until we reached an old, dilapidated airplane, mounted on a 5- 6 story "stick" with metal tunnels attatched to it.   I made it exactly that far when my sense of mortality kicked in and I had enough.  Robby, 35 years my younger, went on.  As demonstrated by this pic of him crawling out the window of the airplane and onto it's wing.

So, after I completely panicked....  this is a pic of Robby climbing from the airplane wing over to the side of the building where there's a big slide for those who don't... uh, panic...

This is well after the scary airplane nonsense that I subjected myself too!  That tower looking thing in the right side of the pic was where I found myself trying to get back to the ground.  I had to crawl down thru tiny openings, and I'm not tiny, until you get to this humongous metal "bowl".  From there?  I can't recall, but I eventually made it.

Again, as I crawl myself out of the extremely well-elevated problem i find myself in, it seems not the bad. Really, it's not that bad!  Especially since I'm sitting in the relative safety of home typing this.  Here's Momma watching Calebber in the giant ball-pit.

And once we were all back on terra-firma, we decided to take a quick break before walking back to our hotel, and more importantly, the restaurant that we wanted to visit, in betwixt.  While momma and I were sitting on a bench, waiting for our explorers to return, they eventually did.  And then, they discovered this little nugget...  they disappeared not ten feet from us, thru a hole in our bench.  We wondered when we would see them again...

And a few minutes later, they pass over the top of us...  What a delightfully weird place!

We all escaped alive.The lads several moments later for lunch at the Mango, Peruvian Cuisine. 

Great food and an even more wonderful time!!  

St. Louis, December 2015... I Forgot, Part II

So a couple of weeks back I had posted a bit about our trip to St. Louis in December of 2015 and how I had forgotten to ever post anything about it.  I did the first post but thought I had too many pictures to just do one blog post.

So here's the second...  and I decided there will be a third as well.  Why?  Because the City Museum is beyond an awesome place to visit! 
 

This is one of the aquariums that they have.  It's hard to really tell what you're looking at here and the scale of it, but trust me when I say, it was cool!

This is from atop one of the staircases that you encounter in the joint.  The stairs are at the bottom of the pic.  Any of the curly-q metal you see is stuff for people to climb in.  Yes, some of the stuff in this photo is over three stories tall.  The long copper'ish looking thing on the right side of the photo is a slide from the story above where we took the picture!

Giant propellers on each side of the photo and the pipe organ room straight ahead.

The pipe organs were, sadly, behind glass and therefore, difficult to get a decent picture.

Crazy chairs.  Now they have these same chairs at the Des Moines Farmers Market.

A display that you can walk on.  So, what is it that they're walking on?

Thousands of tiny people who are holding up the floating glass floor.

Weirdness #1...

Weirdness #2.  This is surrounding the cafe area.

Other weirdness.  I think that this was an area where Robby went down a slide to a different floor and we had to go find him.  A little discomforting, but it all ended well!

The worlds largest pencil. Why?  Because the world likes big, weird things... that's why!

The boys crawling thru some curly-q's that we had no idea of where they would exit.

More of the same...

Second story curly-q's.

Robby is up in there somewhere.  Roughly four stories up.

Speaking of the lad, that's him about dead-center in the photo.  We were on a bench, nearly four stories directly below him.

And so it was.  Up next is the slides and the outside of this wonderful building.

Bak Tu Skoul!

Deck the halls with ba... nope. Tis the season?  

Indeed it is!  Tis' the season to go back to school and terminate the sloth-like beings that inhabit summer break.

Here are the now obligatory back to school photos:

Mr. 3rd Grade, Caleb Rongbo Schmitz

Mr. 6th Grade Center, Robert James Schmitz

And the two ham n' egger's together...  and not jacking around.

So as I post this, day 3 of the school year is in the books.  Caleb is complaining about the constant pre-tests and Robby is claiming excitement in "finding his people".

Some Old Pics With Molly

Found some camera memory cards going thru Molly's stuff. Figured might as well look at them and see if there are any photos.  Turns out there were, and some pretty good ones at that!

There were a ton of photos where Molly and her two friends, Melanie and Talli, had gone somewhere together possibly for a weekend.  Including a trip to a zoo, a restaurant and a Piggly Wiggly, of all places.

Anyway, here are a few that relate to this blog in one way or another...

A tiny Robby after purchasing his crossbow and Grandpa helping him figure it out.

Sassy pants!

The aforementioned Grandpa Jim, possibly at Yellowbanks?

Photo #1 from that trip I mentioned.

Molly and one of her good friends, Melanie.

The "one who should not be photographed" actually posing for not one...

...but TWO pictures on the SAME DAY!!

Sure do miss that smile!  Not too mention doing stuff with the boys and we have an Amazon Fire thingy-ma-bob that she hooked up for us in the basement and we can't for the life of us figure out how to get local channels on it...   *sigh*

Looky, Looky Who Can't Have Cookies!

Well, crunchy cookies that is! Soft cookies would be fine.. 

So I think the lad is ready for 6th grade, freshly shorn and some new braces!  I think he's adorable!

Look closely and you'll see that every other "brace" is either pink or yellowish-green.

Caleb RongBo's Adoption Camp

Friday, August 5th, we were due in Ashland Nebraska to pick up our sweet little Chinaman at adoption camp. 

Last year, I took him to the "day camp" to see if he thought it was cool and something that he might want to do the next year, but for all five days.  He liked it last year and I think he liked it even more this year when attending from Monday afternoon thru Friday afternoon!  

My hope was, he would be excited to see us.  He was.

He would then declare that he wanted to stay there forever.  He did.

And then he would crawl into our vehicle and verbally vomit up his days at camp in such a rapid fashion that we thought it would never end.   And, he did!

Just exactly the same as Robby's first Riverside Lutheran Bible Camp experience!

 

Not many photos from today's camp.  This is the final ceremony where the four groups get up and do their skits that they've been rehearsing.  Obviously, Calebbers group.

Part of the skit...

After a trip to Beertopia, we headed to the Old Market area of Omaha and more specifically the Thomas Mangelson art gallery.  A slightly fudged...  errrr...  artisitc pic of Robby since I had my stupid finger in front of the camera.