I Should Have Been A Marine Biologist....

We had maybe 2-3 days in between the girls having pneumonia when they were both feeling fine. My Mom wanted to take us on a whale watch. When I was younger my parents took us on a whale watch and I got the most amazing photos. The whales were literally jumping out of the water for us all day. It was very memorable. This trip proved to be memorable also, but for other reasons.

We set out from Plymouth, MA and it was a beautiful day...just the girls. This is a photo of my Mom with the girls...



Here is a rare photo of me and my girls, although this was actually taken at the end of the day, as you can see our hair has that lovely wind-blown look that is so appealing...




We had great seating on the lower level and there was almost no one else down there... except this nice woman (she had a really cool camera), her son (Bethany hung out with him) and I'm guessing her Mom. Then Jamie noticed this right near where we were sitting:



This could explain why the trip became memorable; that and the fact that we were at the back of the boat - right where the exhaust fumes were...anyway here are some cool photos from the day...



This is one of my favorites...






You can see they got pretty close...


Now I know you probably can't tell what this next picture is...but it's the whale going under our boat...cool, but a little frightening because even though you get lulled into their gracefulness and excited to see them so close, when they go under the boat you remember that all they have to do is nudge our boat and we will capsize...


For some reason though, this never happens; it's almost like they know there are marine biologists on all of these boats who's main goal in life is to protect them and make life better for them...imagine whale watching for your job!

Now it takes a good hour to get out to where the boat actually stops and does the whale watching. We, however, ended up meeting up with some whales on our way out to the watching area...so we had kind of a pit stop on the way. While me and the girls were excitedly running from one side of the boat to the other, snapping away in awe, I suddenly realized my Mom was sitting down, not really looking at the whales..actually she wasn't moving her head at all. Then I noticed she was a little pale...oh no! I realized she must be seasick...this is not good. We were only about 40 minutes into a 4 hour trip! And there is no way off the boat and nothing you can do about it...I never felt so bad for my Mom...she said she took some motion sickness stuff before she left home, but later realized she had mistakenly taken the stuff to calm her down before she goes on an airplane...so she was sick, but calm - ok very sick, but very calm...she kept telling me to go and enjoy myself, but I felt awful...then she leaned over the railing and got sick...I know she is going to kill me for blogging about this, but while it was happening I wanted to laugh so bad because it happened right when there were whales almost right in front of where she was...so everyone was on that side of the boat...watching....my poor Mom. After that she sat down and closed her eyes and stayed that way until the boat started the motors and headed for home. She wasn't the only casualty - there was a little boy who apparently was brought on the whale watch for his birthday because he got seasick and all he kept crying was "This is the worst birthday EVER"...then he got sick and was perfectly fine after that.

Here are a few more photos...enjoy!


This is another favorite: