Yeah, I know I said I was going to post yesterday. But, I ended up being gone almost all day yesterday and not having time to post.
Continuing from last post we decided to go to Seaworld that Thursday. My dad, sister, Jacob, and Jillian left the house around 11pm and arrived at Seaworld about 30 minutes later. We entered the park and Jeralyn got a stroller that was meant more for carrying things that were bought than to carry the kids. We then made our way towards the far end of the park where the restaurant we wanted to go eat lunch was at. We went to go eat at the Sharks Underwater Grill and put our name in and since we had a 30 minute way we decided to walk though the Shark Encounter exhibit which was right there. You walk in and right away you come upon one of those underwater tubes that you walk through and this one only had different kinds of regular fish swimming around. Jeralyn didn't trust the glass/plastic or whatever those tubes are made out of. She kept asking questions about it that we mostly ignored. After exiting this tube you walk down a slow sloping ramp that winds around until finally you reach the main tube. This tube was in a much larger tank that held the sharks and other larger fish. In the tube they had one of those moving sidewalk things to keep people moving. Jacob thought this was really cool seeing all the sharks swimming around you like that. The coolest and probably largest fish in the tank was the large sawfish and it swam right up against the tank right over our heads and Jacob loved it. Finally we reached the end of the tube made our way up another winding ramp. Along this ramp there was a sign there that explained the tube was strong enough to hold something like the weight of eight elephants on it without breaking and Jeralyn says "Of course they would put that at the end after you have already gone through it." Once we left that we went back up to the front of the restaurant to see how much longer the wait would be and they didn't say they just told us to wait until our name was called. So finally after a couple minutes they called us and took us to our table. The restaurant was pretty cool they had one side of the restaurant that was basically all glass looking into the huge tank that contained the sharks and other large fish. We ordered and ate, I had the barbecue Chicken and Shrimp which I found to be pretty good. Now that we were full we decided to see what the park had to offer.
They told me they wanted to go check out one of the shows and they asked me what shows were coming up (they put me in charge of the map). I told them the two that were coming up within the hour and they decided they wanted to go see the "Pets Ahoy!" show. In the description it said this was a show where dogs, cats, birds and even a pig perform stunts. So we go in there thinking it was going to be some kind of show were there would be a trainer out there having the animals perform tricks. We couldn't have been more wrong. The lights went down, no one came out and then you see this mouse coming out from behind this curtain on the right side of the stage. The mouse then preceded to run across the stage, up a rope, and into a trapped door. Then out from that same curtain the mouse had just come from a cat comes out runs across the stage, up the rope and through the same trap door the mouse had gone in. At the same exact moment the cat came in the trap door the mouse pops out of a different trap door runs to the next door and goes in. As soon as the mouse went in the cat came out went the same route and in the same door the mouse did. This continued about three more times before the mouse finally went into a dog house. The cat follows goes into the dog house and you hear barking and the cat comes flying back out of the dog house runs across the stage and exits to the left. At that moment an English bulldog walks out of the dog house looks around then turns around pulls a string which drops a sign that says "No Cats Allowed" and the dog then walks back into the dog house. The show continued on like this. With the dogs, cats, birds, pigs, and even a skunk, performing on their own without the help of any trainers on stage. It was amazing I had never seen anything like it before. It still amazes me how they got those animals to do those things. Like a cat would set off a trap door and that would set birds off that would fly to the wall behind the audience and that would trigger another cat to walk on two thin, small metal pipes over head of the audience back to the stage where it would jump down and go though another trap door which would set off some other animal to do its thing. Only a couple times did humans ever appear on stage and when they did they were just part of the act. I would extremely highly recommend checking this show out if you ever go to Seaworld. It still blows my mind how they trained that mouse to do that.
From that show we made our way over to Shamu stadium. Both Jacob and Jillian had been waiting to see Shamu. On the way there though we stopped and got to pet some sting rays. We also checked out Dolphins Cove where you can have the Dolphins come right up to the side and maybe even pet them if they get close enough to you. They were pretty cool as they liked to tease just about anyone they could. The Dolphins would knock their toys right over within reach of someone and then just as the person would go to reach for the toy the Dolphin would knock it away. One person even got in short tug-a-war with one of the Dolphins. But the lady lost and let go. From there we stopped by the Manatee exhibit and also saw the baby alligators. From there we picked up the pace and got over to Shamu stadium so that we would know we could get a seat. The kids wanted to sit in the splash zone to get wet so we got about 8 or 9 rows up on the left side of the splash zone (Splash zone goes back 14 rows). Before the show started by dad bought some Shamu towels one for us to keep and gave the others to the kids. The show started and it was pretty much what I had expected a bunch of whale jumping along with the trainers getting in the water with the whales and do tricks with them. Then it was time to splash people. Up to that point in the show the largest Killer Whale we had seen was 17 feet long and weighed about six thousand pounds. The next Killer Whale they brought out to do the splashing they said it was 22 feet long and weighed about 12 thousand pounds. You could definitely tell it was much larger than the others. The sole job of this whale is to splash the audience. It did this but swinging its tale quickly into the water sending large splashes of cold (52 degree) water into the audience. The center got the worst and the Whale slashed the people just to the right of us and the people just to the left of us but missed us. This made the kids upset because they wanted to get wet and didn't. We told them we would come back for the night show and would sit in the center in the splash zone so we would get wet.
From there we went to get some food across the the way from Shamu stadium at a place called "Mango Joes". My dad and I both got the Caesar Chicken wrap, Jeralyn didn't want anything, Jacob only wanted Fries, and Jillian wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We ate that and ended up just sitting there for a little while and next thing we knew it was about 30 minutes until the night show at Shamu Stadium. This show was 10 minutes shorter than the day time show and had rock music (the map claimed modern day rock but in reality it was mostly things like "YMCA" that they played). This was like the day show but faster paced and only half the amount of talking by the trainers. Again time came for the big whale to come out and splash people. Like we had planned we were sitting in the center in the splash zone about 4 rows up. We felt for sure we were going to get wet this time. Well I'll be damned if the whale didn't splash everywhere but the center. We again got away without a drop on us. Funnier even is that if we had sat where we had for the day show we would have gotten soaked. We just were not ment to get wet that day I guess. This of course made the kids upset once again but what can you do. We tried.
From there quickly as we could we made our way across to the other side of the park to see the fireworks show that they called "Mystify". We made it litteraly like two minutes before it started. The show was storyline based like I figured it would have been. They had this big fan of water spraying up which they projected images across that followed the story line. The story was of a kid who as having a dream and he was looking for Shamu. He was just about to get attacked by hungry sharks when Shamu saved him and his mom woke him up. But to this story they had some music and a bunch of different kind of water fountains. Some which which shot way up there. Then there was the fireworks that also went along with the story. Overall the display was decent but I think I have to say I liked the firework show at Magic Kingdom from last year more.
After the firework show we slowly made our way out stopping in some of the shops on our way out. During the day I saw a group of people wearing a cool Seaworld hat so I went around looking for it while Jeralyn looked for stuff for the kids. I found my hat in the last store before the entrance. After buying my hat the kids wanted to go in the candy store that was next store so I took them over there and I got them some lollypops that they wanted. I got a small box of Coconut Patties which is just coconut and sugar partially dipped in Chocolate. My dad went into the ice cream parlor and got himself an ice cream cone. From there Jeralyn returned the stroller and we made our way out of the park. The parking lot was already mostly empty which made getting out easy. We arrived home 30 minutes later and the kids went to bed.
We had planned to go to Animal Kingdom Friday but between the kids being tired from the day before and the rainy weather we decided not to. Saturday Jeralyn and the kids left around noon to head to the airport as their flight left around 1:45pm that afternoon to head home.
Like I figured it was a long post that is why I had decided to split them up. In other news my dad finally got his PT Cruiser back from the shop. He just finished putting almost $3,000 in it putting some kits on it and adding horse power to it. He added and new air filter to it to increase horse power and also added dual exhaust to give it a nice sound. He put a continential kit on the back of it. Put finder skirts over the back wheels. He got some chrome smoothie wheels put on it. He had some port holes put on the sides of the hood. He also got a sun visor put on over the windshield as well as having a fire extinguisher installed in the car. So he is pretty much only a couple parts away from having a gangster car. When I say gangster I am talking back in the day gangsters like something Al Capone would have driven. The guy who did the work on the car took some pictures of it and said he is going to post them on his webpage so when he does I will post the link so you can see what the car looks like now.
|| Vespere Hesperian 11:07 PM
