On thursday we went to the aquarium: it is a pretty nice one, and our state zoo membership gets us half price admission. Oh, and Skibo is absolutely nuts about divers, so the deep sea tank is a huge draw.
After a fair drive (it's over an hour from the beach house to the aquarium, and since I had thought it was less, every minute over the 45 I was expecting felt like an extra hour), and a very pleasant five minute walk from the multi-storey car park across the green space (which turned into a twenty minute race about by the kids, which was wonderful:-) we started our tour.
At the moment, the city has Turtles on the Town: displays of turtle-inspired artwork all over town: other than the fact that the children were not allowed to climb on them they immediately brought lots of little-one joy. And we adults liked them too...
Inside the building, we took the standard route through, starting with the river otters (who were unfortunately asleep in the heat, rather than frolicking as they usually do) -- and it quickly became apparent that the time of day was near when the sprogs would need a mid-morning snack: and so we broke out of tour mode, headed down to the cafe (for perhaps the worst coffee I've had this year!), and then, realising the time, went to the deep sea tank. They have a show every morning in which there are several divers in the tank feeding various of the fish inside (not the sharks: they don't want to get them associating divers with food!)
We found a good side spot to watch the divers rather than the young lady running the presentation that went with it: and a diver saw us, beaconed Skibo over, waved to him, and made it clear that he was setting up so that we could take a picture of him and Skibo (and subsequently Boo too) together. It was quite magical, and made the morning's experience for all of us, and especially for Skibo!
The rest of the aquarium visit was good, with some lovely encounters, for example with real turtles,
jelly fish, crabs, carnivorous plants, tropical fish etc. But nothing could compare to the tank and the diver.
Yours, gratefully,
N.
7 comments:
Michele sent me here to tell you that I, too, love aquariums - yay turtles, yay divers! - and I really enjoyed this post.
Also, I am envious of this whole "beach house" concept.
It sounds like lots of fun!! That's why Michele sent me :)
I *love* the beach house concept. I spent a while earlier this week looking at pictures of two million dollar houses and dreaming of what we could do if we won a big enough lottery:-)
N.
Sounds like a lovely trip. The diver photo is certainly a keeper. Michele sent me.
That was alovely post. I too like visiting aquariums. Michele must have known that about your post!
Skibo must have had lots of fun!
Looks like the little tykes had a blast w/all the interesting sea critters.
Michele likes it when tykes have fun.
I love to visit aquariums! and your photo of the turtles is great. I like the light reflections on the water.
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