shamu says hi

A few months ago I was looking at our niece Laura's university tennis schedule in order to find a weekend where we could travel to see her play this spring. Her team would be in San Diego to play two other colleges over two days during a week which coincided with our spring break, so John and I decided to take the whole family to San Diego a couple of days early and do some additional activities. I'd never been to any of the San Diego parks before but I've heard about how great Sea World and the Wild Animal park are, in particular, and I knew the girls would really enjoy them.

We arrived at our hotel on monday afternoon and the girls wanted to see the hotel pool and swim. San Diego has some really spectacular hotels I think, but that's not where we stayed. We opted to stay at Laura's team's arranged hotel, which is centrally located and clean, but very basic. They did have an outdoor pool. I think it was about 12 feet long and 6 feet wide, and 3 ft deep on the ends and only 4 ft deep in the middle. A pitiful little excuse for a pool, really, but the girls were just.so.excited. to swim* and had a blast that afternoon.
"Can we come back and swim tomorrow?" they all asked.
"No, remember, we're going to Sea World!!!" I answered.
"Oh nooooooooo. We just wanna swim*."

*swim = wearing arm floaties and jumping and splashing in the water

Nevertheless, on our first full day in the city we did indeed visit Sea World. Fortunately, our visit was the week following spring break for the schools in southern California, so the park wasn't very busy.
I especially liked the penguins. We sat and watched them for a long time while a keeper inside was lecturing about them as other keepers were feeding them. The girls' school mascot is the penguins and various classrooms are named for different penguins species, so they girls had fun seeing what these different penguin types actually look like.


The polar bears were entertaining too, as polar bears usually are.

Unfortunately, I had some kind of major camera malfunction I guess, as I've only now discovered, and most of the photos I took at the Shamu (killer whale) show, the sea lion show, and pet show have vanished from my camera. What a bummer, those were good shows. The pet show (mainly dogs and cats, and two very funny pigs) was particularly and surprisingly hilarious. It would be hard to describe and I'm sure I couldn't do it justice if I tried (especially without my pictures) but I highly recommend it.


Since the park was sparsely attended we had time to see all the shows and most of the exhibits in one day. We also had time for some lovely family photos.