SeaWorld!

This weekend my mom came to visit us in California. She had mentioned that she loves SeaWorld so we decided we would plan to go when she came. It was a fast visit, her flight got in late Friday night and she left fairly early Sunday so basically the majority of quality time we spent together was at SeaWorld on Saturday - but it was definitely quality time!!

We had been told to arrive at the park as early as possible because then you have a chance of feeding the animals. And that is exactly what happened. We headed first to the Sea Lion area and within minutes a man came out and handed fish to both my mom and Jason. I got a video of them tossing in fish. It's short, but fun. The Sea Lions were just so cute and excited! It really made me think of that Mickey Mouse episode when Mickey takes a baby Sea Lion home.

Next we went into Turtle Reef, completely unaware that it was it's grand opening day! It was very cool and now I feel somewhat honored that we were some of the first people to see it :-)

Mom in turtle reef

Me in turtle reef

We saw basically all the shows that they put on in a day. The only one we didn't go to was the "House Pets" one. The Sea Lion and Otter shows were hilarious! The odd thing was that all the shows are like plays now. I've only been to Sea World once but when I went I recall that it was just a person talking and asking/telling the animals what to do. Now it's all music and water shooting up all over the place and big screened TV's. Don't get me wrong, it was still very cool, but I feel like it was less about the animals.

The only ride we went on was the Bayside Skyride, which is just a gondola ride. It was nice and peaceful for sure!

At one point Jason decided that I really missed out in the whole feeding the Sea Lion experience and suggested that we go back and pay for me to have my chance to feed the Sea Lions. I was excited to have my chance to do it. It made me surprisingly nervous - but more because there were all these crazy birds around taking the fish right out of peoples' fingers and I didn't want the birds attacking me. The first fish I threw I bird snatched right out of the air which was unfortunate, but the rest made it into sealions' mouths.

I'm not sure that there is a single animal in the whole park that we didn't see. We were really good about getting to everything. We spent 11 hours there. We decided that the best place to take my mom for a California dinner would be In-N-Out Burger (actually she suggested it), so after a day at SeaWorld we ended at In-N-Out then went back to our hotel. It was one of the more perfect days spent in CA for sure!