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Florida Day One - Seaworld

Morning came, sunny and… cold…..

I’m not that familiar with archaic measurement systems, but 50 degrees F is somewhere around bloody cold on the modern Celsius scale. Certainly when you have flown to Florida to escape the longest winter in history.

But, bundled resolutely up in our sweatshirts and coats, we set off for Seaworld to see what we could see. In truth, it wasn’t all that bad — certainly nothing a Timmy’s double double couldn’t have fixed — and other than a bit of a chill in the shade it was probably a good day for it. Once the sun came out and afternoon set in, it warmed up to the point where we carried the kids’ coats.

Cold or not, the place was not short of people. I shudder to think what high season would be like. I am still astounded by how many Brits there were… I noticed at breakfast that they had invaded our hotel, but it became apparent that they had extended their campaign to include Seaworld and Walmart as well. If these Americans aren’t careful, they might wake up one morning speaking English!

So anyway, Seaworld was not bad. There was lots of sea-y kinds of stuff to see, turtles, stingrays, dolphins, etc. The aquarium was okay, but hardly worthy of a place called Seaworld. Alex was there mainly to see the shark exhibit, and was not disappointed (other than by the fact that we stopped at other places on the way there). The multiple aquaria for the sharks were pretty good, and the moving sidewalks through the tunnels into the big ones were brilliant.

We made the mistake of eating in the park, mainly due to not having had a chance to prepare. Won’t do that again… $50+ for lousy ‘jerk chicken’ and cold fries, plus kids’ meals. I had forgotten that in the US, iced tea is literally just that. Yuck. It was amusing though when they directed me to the cream to put in it.

Alex managed to convince Sylvia to take him on a ride that involved being dropped from a height in a boat into a channel of water, which sprayed everywhere. Isabel and I stayed dry and watched from the railing. It looked like it could be fun on a warmer day.

The biggest hit of the day was the stingray pool. Both kids, but especially Alex, were entranced by the shallow pool full of (de-stingered) rays which swam endlessly in circles. They also got a chance to feed the, but of course we failed to discover the correct technique for feeding bottom feeders until *after* the ray food was fully dispensed.

It seems that our ticket into Seaworld gets us in again this week, so we will likely do a follow up visit before we go.

Oh, yeah… I posted some photos, will add more as we go.