That’s where we spent our last day of vacation. It was a surprise for the kids, though they did their level best to get us to spill the beans ahead of time. After realizing the brute force approach wasn’t working (“Where are we going?” Answer: “You’ll see” or “To where we’re going.”) they started using more elaborate strategies. For instance, they’d ask if we were going to place ‘X’ in an attempt to narrow down the field of possibilities. They’d ask what city it was in. Or they’d ask if we’d been “there” before. Regardless of the tactic, we maintained our cone of silence right until our arrival.
The penguins were the big attraction. They were center stage around a massive center-column aquarium with all kinds of fish swimming around, including what looked like a couple of sand sharks. There were also some groupers and a couple of massive sea turtles. I’d say that aquarium was roughly 4 stories tall and about 50-60 feet in diameter. As big as it was, many of the fish in it looked cramped for space- especially the sharks and groupers.
Around the center-aquarium were a variety of smaller aquariums stuffed to the gills (ahem) with fish. A few of the tanks had some good sized fish, but mostly they were of the smaller variety. The high lite was when the kids got to see some Cuttle Fish eat shrimp. Let’s face it, Nature at her rawest is pretty cool in general.
We ended the day watching a 3-D Imax movie about fish of the sea. It was a little disappointing, in truth, because it spent a disproportionate amount of time on just a few types of fish, the Cuttle fish in particular. It was also narrated by Jim Carrey, whom made sure to take the time to lecture us about how evil we all are and how we’re destroying our oceans but “we’re starting to learn we can do things better” blah blah blah. Too bad a shark couldn’t take a bite out of his ass.
The fun thing about the 3-D was the lass, who repeatedly would put her hand out to “pet” or touch the fish. The end featured a section where seals were coming right up to the camera and that was when she was at her most frantic in attempts to pet the seals. It was amusing to watch. When everything was done, I asked her what the seals felt like. She replied “Dad, I couldn’t actually touch them! It was just a movie.”
Well, the 3-D hadn’t fooled me. But she certainly did.