**Warning: Mega picture overload! It was a busy day so we took lots of pictures!
I totally lucked out with our SeaWorld tickets. If I paid regular price (which I thought I was going to have to) it was going to cost us $55 a person for one day of SeaWorld. It would be $165 total since Nash is free. Right before I bought my tickets, my Mom pointed out a Groupon for SeaWorld to me. It was $35 a person, I had a $5 off coupon and I got $6 back on Ebates. So after all the discounts we paid $94 for our SeaWorld passes. But it gets even better…..they were multi-day passes. They were good for 14 consecutive days! We only used them for 2 days though. It was such an awesome deal!!
The hotel we stayed at saved us a little extra money too. Parking is $20 a day at SeaWorld and we got to bypass that by riding the free shuttle from our hotel. We were the only ones on our shuttle to SeaWorld on Monday!
The boys were pretty impressed that the bus had seat belts. It made this Momma happy too since we didn't have our car seats. We really were close to SeaWorld, but it just made me feel better that they had some form of safety belt on.
We were told to get to there early, but we really didn't need to. Monday was their first time to be open during the week for the season so it wasn't busy at all. We walked around the entrance for about 30 minutes just killing time.
Thankfully they let us into a little portion of the park before they actually opened. Matt got a coffee, we looked in the gift shop and took an official SeaWorld picture.
Our first stop was to see the sea lions.
There were swimming all around when we got there and very eager for us to start feeding them.
When they finally opened the feeding station, we paid twenty stinkin' dollars for 4 trays of dead fish (4 fish in each tray). But it was worth every penny. The boys loved it!!
I was actually kind of surprised Pearson held the fish, but it didn't surprise me at all that Nash did.
They were so stinky!!
It was fun to watch the sea lions race to the fish. Sometimes they even got a little aggressive with each other trying to be the winner.
Pearson is obsessed with maps, so he was our little tour guide, telling us where we needed to go all day!
Our next stop was the "ow-wayters" as Nash calls them.
It was a pretty impressive alligator exhibit because there were at least 12 in the pond, and a lot of them were moving around. There are only 2 at the Caldwell Zoo and we have never seen them move!
Nash also really liked the turtles that were in the pond because they kept crawling up on the alligators back. It didn't bother the alligators one bit.
Our first show was the Sea Lion High.
It was really cheesy, but the boys loved it!
Next up was the penguin exhibit.
Again, this was an impressive exhibit because of the amount of penguins and variety of penguins they had. This picture is just a small portion of all the penguins there.
We ate a quick lunch at one of the over-priced restaurants then headed to another show. It was a more educational show teaching us all about the beluga whales and Pacific white-sided dolphins. It was really neat to see the relationships that the animals have with their trainers.
When the show was over we walked over to the new Discovery Point. It was a beautiful new area of the park where all the dolphins were.
I was a little disappointed that we couldn't feed or touch them like you could at the old dophin exhibit, but it was still really awesome being able to be so close to them.
We were able to get so close to them. My favorite part was watching them play. They would chase each other and jump in and out of the water.
Another neat aspect to their new Discovery Point is the underwater observatory. We could see them up close and personal underwater too!!
While Nash and I had a snack, Matt and Pearson decided to ride the Rio Loco.
Because of the angle they were at, I could only get Matt in the picture, but Pearson was just to the left of him.
They came out absolutely soaked but with big ole smiles on their face.
They were so soaked that Matt had to ring out his socks. I tried to get them to wait until Wednesday (our wet day at SeaWorld), but he insisted they wouldn't get that wet. I bet it did feel pretty good though, because it was SO humid while we were there.
Since Nash and I didn't cool off in the water, we were thankful that our next show was an indoor show.
It was called "Pets Ahoy". Matt and I didn't go to it when we went to SeaWorld 7 years ago, but we decided to go this time because Nash loves all animals. He really loved this show. It was pretty cute and pretty impressive how well the rescue animals were trained.
We played at a park just right outside of the Pets Ahoy show before we headed over to our last show of the day.
We were all pooped but I remembered really liking the Azul show the last time we went, so we powered through our nap time so we could see it.
It definitely didn't disappoint. This is probably my favorite show at SeaWorld.
The boys were totally impressed with all the tricks the dolphins, but they were equally impressed with the acrobatics. They did so many cool flips and tricks and dives.
The hotel shuttle picked us up, the big boys got a quick shower and we darted out for dinner. We were starving. We ate at a little mexican restaurant called Mama Margie's. It was kind of like a Taco Cabana.
On our way back to the hotel we stopped at Freddy's for frozen custard. The restaurant reminded me of a Steak N Shake that sold Andy's Frozen Custard instead of shakes.
After a busy busy day, the boys had no problems falling asleep in the hotel. Matt and I were in bed before 9pm too. We were pooped!!
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