Point Reyes Lighthouse - Whale Watching

If you read the post about my last whale watching adventure, then you might wonder why I'd ever want to whale watch again.  Well, let me assure you, we spent no time on a boat for this trip!  :)  Our feet were all firmly planted on solid ground, and the whale watching was much more enjoyable.

Right after the whale watching fiasco of last March, I was told about some whale watching at the Point Reyes National Seashore Lighthouse.  I checked it out online and saw that you can only see whales from the lighthouse for a few months out of the year.  These grey whales migrate down to Baja California in January, then back up around March and April.  The odds of us actually seeing a whale?  Probably not that great, but we had to give it a try!  Some friends of ours (Brandon and Meg) also wanted to go, so the four of us drove out there on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  :)

Upon arriving, we had to park at a beach and ride a bus up to the lighthouse.  The beach was beautiful!  Let me just say right now that it was a gorgeous day, but absolutely freezing, and Travis and I did not quite dress the part....

While on the bus, we saw some Tule Elk along the side of the road.  This next picture was taken by Travis from the inside of the bus.

As soon as the bus stopped and we got off, we were greeted with a gorgeous view of the Pacific Ocean!

We then had to hike almost half a mile to get to the lighthouse.  Along the way we saw some deer.

We got to the lighthouse area and ate a picnic lunch, then continued the trek...  To get to the lighthouse itself, we had to walk down the equivalent of a 30 story building.  Once we were there, though - - beautiful!

And so the whale watching began.  We walked around all sides of the lighthouse and didn't see much of anything.  Travis and I saw a sea lion swimming at one point.  Let me preface this next section by saying that Brandon was playing "the boy who cried wolf," or, in our case, "the boy who cried whale."  He kept yelling out, "Whale!!" when there was nothing to see.  So, when he actually DID see a whale, none of us believed him!  Lucky for us, this whale decided to swim around for quite a while, and stayed pretty close to the coast!  We saw it many times, over a period of 5-10 minutes.  Travis used our telephoto lens (with his impressively steady hands) and took all of the following pictures.

After the whale sighting, we hiked back up the 30 stories to the top.  Along the climb, I stopped and took this picture.

Back at the top we all took a picture with a whale skull.

So there you go!  My first whale sighting!  It was very fun, and very exciting!  I wish I had known about this place last March...  ;)

An Unexpected Ride

About a week and a half ago, Travis and I went with a couple of friends to whale watch at the lighthouse at Point Reyes National Seashore.  I had planned on posting about this trip a week ago.  Unfortunately, Travis left for a tour with the brass quintet and took my laptop with him.  Of course, my laptop has all of the pictures we took, as well as Photoshop....  He came home today (yay!), and while I'm picking from our many pictures and playing with them in Photoshop, I thought I'd leave you with this video:

On the way home from Point Reyes, we took a wrong turn and unexpectedly ended up on a road surrounded by redwoods.  Here is part of our drive...

*Please pardon the horrible road noises.  I promise, my car did not fall apart!*

Be sure to watch the video on YouTube to get full screen and HD video.

~We may or may not have seen a whale on our trip...  stay tuned!~

Textures

I am still on Christmas vacation, so I had a great time being lazy while Travis was at work today.  haha!  I wasted most of the day on the internet, but I'm not sure I can actually call it a waste anymore.  I stumbled upon an awesome photography blog a couple of months ago and was looking at it this afternoon.  This lady gives away all kinds of Photoshop actions and textures (that she makes herself) for free!  Interested?  Click here.

I was checking out some of her digital paper and found some textures that she's made.  I had heard of textures before, and I knew that it was something you put on a picture to (obviously) give it another texture, but I hadn't ever tried it.  So I downloaded some textures and proceeded to look for her tutorials on how to use them.  I found her texture tutorial here and a tutorial on layer masks here.  (In case you don't want to read her blog, but want to know what a layer mask is, I used it to take the texture off of faces and things I didn't want the texture on.)

So, without further ado, here are some pictures that I edited today.  Let me know what you think!!

This is the first one I tried.  It got me hooked!  haha
{For the record, all of the "befores" are on the left and all of the "afters" are on the right.}

This texture totally made the color pop!  So cool.

I found some Valentine's textures, so I dug up an old Valentine's picture.
This one isn't my favorite, but kinda cool, I guess.  :-P

I love this picture!  My husband is so handsome!

Last but not least, I LOVE this one!  It looks like a movie poster, doesn't it?  :)

So fun.  So simple.  Yay!

A Fish and R2D2

Happy New Year, everyone!  It has been a while since I've posted on the blog.  Sorry about that!  It has been a busy month!  Well, as promised, I am finally posting the pictures and info on crochet projects that I actually finished a couple of months ago.  These are the projects that I was giving away at Christmas (as mentioned at the end of the baby blanket and hat post).  

Let's start with the fish hat.  Do you remember the picture I took of Randy and the shark hat when he came to visit me back in March?  No?  It's ok, you can see it here if you scroll to the bottom.  Anyway, I was looking at one of my favorite crochet pattern sites when I saw this hat that reminded me of the shark.  I pulled out some old yarn and started to work!  Here's the finished product:

*Sorry for the not-so-great quality of pictures...  I was using my phone instead of lugging my nice camera around while we were out of town.*

{You can find this pattern here.}

I did not alter this pattern in any way.  It came out pretty awesome, don't you think?  The pattern suggests using a size K hook for an adult, so I did that since I tend to crochet tight/small.  I actually learned some new crochet stitches with this one.  :)  Randy had no idea what it was when he opened the present.  haha!  Here are some pictures from Christmas morning:

The same day that I found the fish hat pattern I also found a pattern to make an R2D2 hat.  Um, yes please!  I knew Ryan would love it, so I went out and bought the right colors of yarn.  The most difficult (or, more accurately, annoying) part of this hat was making all of the little extra things and then sewing them onto the hat.  The hat itself was a piece of cake.  Here's a shot of the front and back:

{You can get the pattern here.}

I used a crochet hook sized H.  I thought that the bottom of this hat didn't look quite enough like R2D2, so I added a few more rows.  After crocheting that big section of blue (that changes to grey in the back), I crocheted one round of single crochets in grey, one round of half-double crochets in blue, and one round of double crochets in grey.  The number of stitches in each of those rounds I kept the same as the final round in the pattern (in other words, I didn't do any increasing or decreasing of stitches).  I also didn't make the little rectangles and circles that the pattern said to sew onto the back of the hat.  I didn't like them.  :)

Here is Ryan opening his present on Christmas morning:

So there you go!  Believe it or not, I have two more crochet projects to post about, but you'll just have to wait.  :)  I hope y'all had a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!  We did.  :)