Back at the end of November we decided to take a little family trip to Monterey, just for the heck of it. Some good friends of ours had spent some time living there and encouraged us to check it out since we live so close.
Of course the first thing on our agenda was to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The aquarium is located on the water on what's called Cannery Row, so when you first enter there's an exhibit that tells about the history of that area and what was canned there decades ago.
The aquarium itself is really big and really impressive. It took us most of the day to see everything, and we only attended one live auditorium program.
The kids really loved the touch pools. Here they're waiting for the bat rays to swim close enough to touch them. It took a while, but they finally did.
Jellyfish totally freak me out, but they really are fascinating to look at.
This ocean sun fish is one of the weirdest, biggest, ugliest fish I've ever seen. The kids were enthralled with it and are still drawing pictures of it, 3 months later.
The next day we just played. The Dennis the Menace playground was near our hotel so we spent a good part of the morning letting the kids run around there.
I think they spent 90% of their time on this slide.
Of course we had to get down to the water, so while I snapped pictures Aaron and the kids played chicken with the tide.
This is my "I'm here, too!" shot.
I think this was the last picture I got before a wave rushed in really fast and made everybody turn and run.
Hakan tripped and ended up getting clobbered. He was soaked from head to toe, so we headed back to the hotel to get him dried off.Later in the afternoon we found a little children's museum/science center where the kids were able to play and do all kinds of fun things.
Pyper and Hakan spent a long time in the craft area constructing "vehicles" out of recycled objects. (I also just now noticed that the paper on the table by Pyper says "Bryce". Weird.)
After dinner we decided to do some walking, so we found an outdoor mall and started to wander. The kids were impressed by this Lego display.
We kept seeing people walking by with reindeer antler headbands on, and soon started to hear some music. Turns out that night was a Christmas concert of some kind and we accidentally stumbled upon Santa and Mrs. Claus, too!
We had to head home the next day, but first we went for a little drive to find a beach where we could do a little combing.
The weather wasn't too great, so Aaron headed back to the car with Finnley while the other kids and I looked a little while longer for treasures.
I would have liked to have spent some more time at the beach, but overall we had a really great trip. The weather was pretty great, we got to do and see everything we wanted to and we all had a fantastic time! 
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