Oregon Coast in Nov

When had Thanksgiving dinner with my cousin Patrice and her family who don't live very far away from us. We have loved getting to live closer to them and had a great time eating a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at their home.

The day after Thanksgiving we took a trip to the coast.  This time we went a little more north to Seaside.  I think the coast here is just beautiful.  The weather turned out to be really quite pleasant especially for November.  The funny thing is the temperature outside seemed similar to when we visited the coast in Aug (I think it rarely gets really warm on the coast out here). 

Tori and James above are standing by the statue marking the stop where Lewis and Clark finished their journey across the US.  I loved that all the moving we have done has let us visit some really cool sites and really get to know a lot of different parts of our country.  It's a beautiful place.

Above Tori is flying one of the mini kites we bought for her and James.

Ellie also enjoyed flying/eating the kite.

The wind at times made is a little chilly, so Ellie and I warmed each other up.

Nothing like playing in the ocean and sand wearing your winter coat.

We also took the kids to the small, very interesting/slight scary aquarium they had in town.  Tori is standing next to a cage full of seals that you can feed.  There was also a large octopus in an open tank in the middle of the room, and lots of other interesting fish in this sort of dark one room aquarium.

Near the end of the day we found a beach that you could drive your car on and parked our car to watch the sun set over the ocean.  A very fun day.

After this, we drove up to Astoria (where the movie Goonies was filmed) and had a late dinner.  On the drive up I kept commenting on all the Elk Crossing signs we were passing.  John and I both chatted about how we had never actually seen an elk, then all of a sudden the cars in front of us stopped fast and a heard of elk bounded across the road 50 ft in front of us.  Unfortunately, a car two cars in front of us actually hit one of the elk and was banged up pretty bad.  Everyone was fine, though, including the elk.