I suppose I will start off with why we were out there. I was lucky enough to be chosen to go with TopSpot to the Google Premier SMB Partner Summit, which was held in Mountain View, CA at Google! To say I was excited is an understatement and to say my Google loving husband was jealous is also an understatement! What an experience to get to go to Google, it was beyond awesome! The campus was amazing and I was so impressed with the Summit. Wonderful speakers, food and we had a great time hearing our company president speak! It was an amazing experience and one I am truly grateful for. It reminds me how lucky I am to work as such an awesome company with great people!
The Summit was over on Thursday and Nathan flew out to meet me and spend a long weekend in San Francisco! It was our first time in California and we instantly fell in love with the city of San Francisco! We spent Friday seeing Fisherman's wharf, the sea lions at Pier 39, Ghirardelli's Square, rode a cable car and strolled around Union Square. It was so fun and the sea lions were hilarious and gave us a taste of what was to come on Saturday!
Saturday we checked one major thing off of my bucket list! I have always wanted to go Whale Watching and our experience honestly made one of my dreams come true! I have always had a love for marine life, but whales have always had my heart! We took off our our tour at 7:30 am and our tour guide, Miss Carol, told us to expect the unexpected and boy were we surprised! Our trip started out by going under the Golden Gate Bridge and heading towards the Farallon Islands. Once we got to the islands we saw 2 spouts of water, we knew we were in the presence of whales and Capt. Tom took us in the direction of the spouts. While we were waiting for the whales to surface we saw an adorable seal swim right up to the boat and right past Nathan and I! Right then we saw 2 Gray Whales surface. They were beautiful! The whales were just resting so we stayed with them for about 20 minutes getting to see them wave at us with their pectoral fins and even smack their tails! It was awesome and my dream to see whales had come true! We then circled around the Farallon islands getting to see the thousands of birds, seals and seal lions that call those islands home. You could even see the seals "body surfing" by the island. After circling the island, we headed out to the continental shelf where the water was 1,000 ft deep. Once we got there we saw a few white sided pacific dolphins but then we realized that we were in the middle of a super pod! It was a once in a lifetime experience. We were in the middle of 2,000 white sided pacific dolphins! They were jumping and flipping out of the water, swimming right next to the boat, it was amazing! We got a few videos of the dolphins swimming by the boat, but we weren't able to capture how many dolphins there were. It was beautiful, and indescribable. It literally took my breath away. We have posted some videos to share with you all! While watching the dolphins, we noticed 2 more spouts of water. We decided to head towards them to see if we were able to see any other whales. We followed the spouts and were lucky enough to see 2 humpback whales! We were so close to them, it was amazing. While I secretly was hoping to see humpbacks, I didn't expect it because most humpbacks were out of the San Francisco area at this time of year. Overall we had the experience of a lifetime and I was so happy to share this experience with Nathan. We both were on cloud 9 after the tour and couldn't have asked for a more perfect ending to our trip!
We are so lucky for the opportunities we have been given and this trip was one of the best trips ever! We are counting down the hours until we are back in Kentucky (47 hours until we leave!) and can't wait to spend Christmas with our families and NYE with our friends!
Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!
Kelly & Nathan
Videos of the Pacific white sided dolphins:
Abby & I with the Android Snowman at Google! They had brought in snow for a video!
Abby & I with Stan the Dinosaur on Google's campus. He just had a delicious meal of pink flamingos apparently!
Dave, Tim, Abby & I at the amazing Google Store.
Nathan and I with the Golden Gate bridge in the background!
We had fun with the decorated cable car!
Little fuzzy picture whale watching, but the only one we had on our camera!
View of the amazing Farallon islands. They were incredible and are home to so many birds, seals and sea lions!
