Sunday, October 4, 2009

The Living Planet Aquarium

To start off, Sophie absolutely LOVES fish. Her favorite movie for over a year was Finding Nemo. Fish just amaze her. I've wanted to take her to the Aquarium down in Sandy for months... but it's an hour away! This past Saturday we made the long drive down.
(the place had HORRIBLE lighting, so a lot of the pictures weren't as good. Next time I'll take a flashlight! A good deal of these were taken by my lovely husband. YAY HUSBAND!)
Denny and Sophie staring into a big dome. Inside were a bunch of little jellyfish looking things.
I just loved the jellyfish, I think they are so pretty. You can't see it because of my camera flash, but they were glowing red, it was awesome! (on a side note, I love how I accidentally got Sophie's reflection in the picture)
One of the coolest things was an open tank they had, it was full of fish and STINGRAYS! You were allowed to touch the stingrays, but only if you used two fingers.
Sophie and I were putting our hands in the water, trying to get one to come near us. Once one actually did, it pretty much tried to escape (thinking we were feeding it) and scared the hell out of Sophie. Needless to say, she did NOT put her hand in the water again.
With much convincing, and me doing it first, I got her to touch a starfish. I was actually surprised by how firm it was, I always imagined starfish to be squishy. Shows how much I know. (and she did touch the starfish herself, I was just trying to hold her hand still for the camera)
These are oodles of penguin pictures, if you donate money - you get to sign one. We donated a dollar. :) So our names will hang proudly with all the other people who love penguins. We will definitely go back there once the penguins come. I LOVE PENGUINS!
Another very cool attraction was the electric eel. They were actually feeding it right as we were walking by. The little sign above it with the green, yellow and red, is the amount of electric charge it was giving off. Green - calm, Yellow - hunting, and Red - stunning prey. It was also hooked up to a speaker so we could hear the voltage it gave off. I thought it was rather nifty, but I would never want to piss one of those things off.
Little alligator just hanging out in the water. I thought it was weird that they had a turtle in there with the alligators. It was fairly larger than the alligators, but still. Odd.
They had a little area called "Coral Community." It was pretty much a giant 'coral' area with little fish tanks built in. There were little tunnels for the kids to run through, and look at the fish while they did so. Sophie had a blast.
As we were leaving we noticed the collection of Steve Irwin dolls they had in the gift shop. We both found this rather silly. Stingrays + Steve Irwin dolls = coincidence? I THINK NOT!


My darling husband took around 150 pictures for me, so if you would like to see the rest of our awesome adventure - here is our Living Planet Aquarium Album.

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