The Sea World Weekend

At the end of April we decided it would be a good idea to get season passes to Sea World. We figured it would be fun and, since we live so close, we would get lots of use out of them. Well, this weekend, after making several very weak commitments to go, we made a concerted effort to actually pack up and haul ourselves all the way down the I-8 to Sea World to finally get some use out of those tickets.

Apart from the fact that everyone and their dog was there being a hot Saturday afternoon, it was actually a lot of fun. The beautiful thing about having season passes is that you don't have to do everything in one day, risk suffering from overkill, and then hate life at the end. We went first to the Dolphin show, which would have been excellent entertainment in an of itself, but which was made even better when a woman from Tuscon, AZ fell into the tank (clothes, shoes, and all) trying to take a picture of her son who was petting one of the dolphins. The tank is 55F and she had no wet-suit so she came up gasping for breath and splashing around - very funny, but it didn't stop there. One of the star dolphin swam out to where she was, and she started patting him on the head. The audience let out a sigh of relief thinking the dolphin was going to rescue her and take her back to dry land, but the trainers all started yelling at her to stop. "Don't pet him! No, no! Stop!" And sure enough the dolphin promptly put it's nose to her shoes and pushed her across the entire length of the tank thinking she was a trainer in disguise and a part of the show. Then he did it again back the other way and looped around so she went sailing into that ledge with 6 inches of water. High entertainment value. I think Sea World should recruit the woman and make her a part of their shows... I would go to watch that again, for sure! I just wish we had captured the whole thing on video.

Baby seemed to quite enjoy the dolphins. We were sitting on the top row (determined not to get wet in any way!) and so I'm not sure how much she could really see, but if nothing else she really enjoyed the atmosphere. She got pretty excited, especially when the crowd was cheering, and she was looking intently at the tank - mainly, I think, because it was bright blue and big.



From there we went across to see the penguins and sharks and tropical fish. It was kind of sad to see actually... the penguins definitely looked like they had given up on life and were, therefore, quite boring. Baby slept right through everything with her sunhat pulled over her eyes, Mr. Monkey's leg tightly in one hand, and her thumb in her mouth. Maybe we should take her to go see the dolphins more often - all the excitement tuckered her right out!



Anyway, after the highly disappointing performances by the penguins we decided our last stop would be the Forbidden Reef with the Bat Rays. Since baby was asleep in her push-chair I didn't have to worry about dropping her in the water, so I got to pet the rays. It was a really cool experience - cool meaning cold too... the water was 55F. They felt slimy and rubbery, or to quote the little boy who was petting the dolphin (whose Mom fell in), "It feels like a hot-dog". We also got a quick little science lesson and learned that Ray don't have any bones in their bodies, and they are essentially boneless sharks. I thought that was pretty neat - I petted a shark! Then, right at the end, just as my arm was going completely numb from cold, this big papa ray swam over and put itself right in front of me and went to sleep while I stroked its head and back. If it could purr I think it would have!



So all in all, we did just about enough that we had lots of fun, but we left enough out that we still want to go back to do the rest. That's the best way to do it, I think!