Macaws, and Dolphins, and Whales, Oh My!

A couple of weeks ago, we took a whale-watching cruise at Dana Wharf. Thanks to a Groupon, the tickets were only $15 a piece. Not too shabby, especially for all that we got to experience.

I'll let the photo captions tell the rest of the story.

When we arrived at the wharf for the cruise, this guy was hanging out with his birds. He was SO knowledgable about them, and clearly took such good care of them. We got a great bird education, totally out of the blue. And totally free! (Though we did give him a well-deserved tip.) It pays to arrive early, folks. If we'd been running late, we wouldn't have had time to stop and enjoy the birdies.

Dolittle was totally in her element. Really, how many times in your life are you going to have three huge tropical birds perched on you? 

The Muse was a little more reticent, but she even held and petted the cockatoo. BoyWonder said no thanks. :)

Dolittle even got a "kiss" from the macaw. They were so cute!

This was our boat for the cruise. We took motion sickness pills beforehand, which was smart. I still felt a little queasy by the end, but lunch and dinner stayed down. Yay.

My Mama. :)

Havarti and The Muse. The Muse was quite nervous about taking to the open ocean, but in the end she was very happy we went.

And nerves take a backseat when dolphins come swimming by. Dolphins! So cool.

They swim so fast! I took like a gazillion pictures, and had no idea if any of them were actually capturing anything.

So I was very happy to see that some of them turned out. I'll shut up for a minute and just let you see.

I just love this one. :)

We also got to see a blue whale. The largest animal on Earth! Dude! Blue whales aren't as common this time of year, and the two previous cruises that day hadn't seen any whales, so we were psyched. Did you know that a blue whale's heart is the size of a Volkswagon beetle? That's insane! BoyWonder could swim through its arteries! Its tongue is the size of an African elephant. Its TONGUE! Geez. 

Sorry, the photos aren't great, but that big gray blob really is a blue whale. They're called blue whales because the algae on their skin makes the water around them glow blue. You can't see that in the photo, but we could see it in real life. I have video of it surfacing and fluking, but I can't get it to load to YouTube. So this is all al bit anticlimactic for y'all. You can easily see better photos and video of blue whales online anyway, so these photos are really for us to keep the memory alive. I will say it's a little surreal to see a blue whale in real life. All night I just kept thinking, "I saw a blue whale today. I saw a blue whale today!" Last month we were in Chicago. Zero chance of seeing a blue whale there. Travel is cool. 

It was a magical evening, and another amazing Southern California experience. We're realizing why so many people pay craploads of money to live here. It kind of rocks.