One more week till we all come home! Barty is very excited and looking forward to seeing you all again. We've been on the west coast of the United States for a week and everything is very BIG!
We were in San Francisco first of all, a very beautiful city surrounded by water.
The Pacific ocean is on one side and some big bays on the other. The narrow gap between the ocean and the bays is called the Golden Gate.
Across the Golden Gate is a very famous bridge called the Golden Gate Bridge. It's very BIG!
This is the size of one of the cables that come from the towers down to the bridge.
We drove over the bridge to take photos from the other side, looking back to the city.
We also visited Santa Cruz which is a couple of hours down the coast. Nearby there are some very BIG! trees.
They are called Redwoods and they are the tallest trees in the world. Some of them can grow to over 112 metres tall. Imagine 70 Laurens standing on top of each other and that's about how tall they get. They also have to get pretty wide at the bottom to take that weight.
The next big thing we saw was in the forest where the Redwoods live, and it was a very BIG! slug called a banana slug. Can you tell why?
This one was actually quite a small one but they can get a lot bigger and we liked the pretty yellow colour.
The last BIG! thing we saw on the West Coast were elephant seals. They aren't as big as elephants but they are very BIG! for a seal. They can grow up to nearly 5 metres long (about 3 Laurens lying down end to end) and weigh as much as 2,200 kg. That's nearly 40 times heavier than Barty.
At breeding time all the females huddle together in a ring with one big boss male to look after them and to try and mate with them all. There are lots of other males who want to mate as well and they keep trying to sneak into the group so the big boss male spends a lot of time chasing the other males away and fighting with them.
We couldn't get close enough to take clear photos so Barty bought some postcards to show you what they are like close up. This is a male, and you might be able to tell why they are called elephant seals now.
When the males fight, they get covered in blood but they don't really hurt each other as much as it looks. They have very thick, scaly skin on their necks so they don't do any real damage, and one of them soon backs away and leaves the other one as the boss.
The pups weigh about 35 kg when they are born. Feeding on their mother's rich milk (55% fat), they grow to around 135 kg in less than a month. Some pups are very greedy and they nurse from two or three females. They can weigh twice as much as other pups, about 270 kg, and are called "super weaners".
We are all now back in Detroit, and the last BIG! thing is the snow. There was already a lot on the ground when we got here, and it's been snowing today for several hours so it's getting pretty deep. We went out for a play but the temperature is -5 degrees centigrade so we didn't stay out for long. That's the warmest it's been so far, it was -14 the other evening.
All the lakes around the house are frozen except for one tiny patch where the water from one lake flows from underground into the other. It's the only place the swans can get any food so they live all winter on this tiny patch of open water. It must be very cold for them!
Well that's it from us, we hope you all have a lovely weekend at Baz and Bompa's.Lots of love from Teddy Bear and the Little People.
Lots of love and BIG! hugs and kisses to you all from Barty and Arnie as well.
Special message from Barty to Lauren:
Hi Lauren,
I've found a couple of shops near our house which sell Hannah Montana stuff. Could you have a look at their websites please, and let me know what your favourite things would be. You can either email me details or have a list ready for when I phone. Put down quite a lot of things because they might not have them all in the shop - make sure you know what the things you most want are and I'll make a special effort to get them. So you know how much things are, 2 American dollars is roughly 1 English pound, so $9.99 is about £5. The websites are www.toysrus.com and www.claires.com.
I can hardly wait to see you next week!
Lots of love,
Barty.
