Hello! I hope you all had a nice 4th of July weekend. We sure did. Wes, Elaine and Jordan came down to visit us, with Buddy the dog. They drove down in their newly-acquired rv. They visited with us here for a couple of days, and while we were here in Forestville, we were able to score a short tour around the Bodega Marine Lab with Jackie, who knows everything about everything! She was an awesome tour guide and we got to see many cool things, including blue lobsters! Lobsters turn red from things they eat, and apparently they don't get to eat those things in the lab, so they turn blue instead. I didn't take a photo of one, but I wish now that I had! While we were out there, we also had a little time to spend in the high intertidal to see some tidepool things, and then we had dinner at Bodega Head with a great ocean view. That was cool.

We headed south, and met up with Melinda and Cory, who showed us some things around the Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz. Highlights included the blue and grey whale skeletons, the research dolphins (live ones!), and elephant seal hats, which are instruments that attach to seal heads to measure things in the water as they travel around at sea. It's great to know people in the know who can show you neat things!

We spent the 4th visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which was fun, as always. It was a bit crowded, but we couldn't expect any less at this time of year. We got to see the new exhibit, the seahorses, which was very cool. What interesting little critters (that's Elaine and Jordan with the seahorse movie, above). We also watched the broadcast feeding of the fish in the open sea tank (where the tuna are). That was very cool. The food is thrown into the tank, and the fish swim fast to get a bite before it's gone. What we saw that none of had known before is that dolphinfish (mahi mahi) change color and turn golden when they're excited in a feeding frenzy. Pretty amazing.

We returned back to Forestville via San Francisco and Fisherman's Wharf. We had no luck finding parking down there, though, so we didn't stop, just drove by. We also stopped to hang in downtown Petaluma for a couple of hours. The weekend was very nice and it was good to hang out with all of them.