July 22, 2011
Grace and I have now officially retired from Girl Scouts. The troop celebrated the end of the year with a trip to Sea World earlier this summer. All those years of selling Thin Mints paid off!
We loaded up in 29 moms, a dad, 16 scouts and lots of luggage into five cars and drove over to San Diego on May 31.
Check in at Sea World was at 6:00 pm. The SW people gave us all a lovely bright yellow Camp T-shirt we all (yes, even the grown ups) had to wear the entire time. At this point, the park was closed so it was just the campers around.
We ate a fairly decent pasta dinner and then split up into smaller groups for three different camp activities.
We learned all about the different varieties of penguins and how SW identifies each identical penguin in its park: id bands. The girls then made their own id bracelets.
From Penguin Class, we went to the new Sea Turtle exhibit in SW. It was really amazing. A SW employee explained all the parts to a sea turtle and how to tell boys from girls and the different kinds. One girl in our group get to play dress up as a Sea Turtle. It was hilarious.
The last activity of the night was near the Dolphin exhibit, but the dolphins had gone to sleep for the night, so we didn't really see much of them. We learned that Dolphins are whales, but whales are not dolphins. Then we used a super-duper extremely long spool of rope to see how long several different species of whales are. The largest, the Blue Whale, is equal to 3 school buses. That's really long.
Now for the exciting part...
We went to our sleeping quarters in the Beluga Whale exhibit. It was around 50 something degrees in there. Brr. But it was cool and peaceful to see the whales swimming in the dark. I was bundled up in a ski cap and a sleep mask, which helped keep my face warm.
we slept on the floor in sleeping bags there >>
This Ice Wall was right around the corner from our sleeping quarters.
And our neighbors for the evening were these snuggly bears. Look in the cave to see the sleeping polar bear.
The next morning we packed up and had breakfast. Before the park opened to the public, we got a tour of the shark exhibit and the girls got to feed the sea lions.
Then we went to watch the dolphin training up close. That meant when the park opened, we were first in line to feed the dolphins. Three fish each and you pet the dolphin's nose after each fish.
We saw the Dolphins Show (too much human acrobatics in my opinion). The girls rode Journey to Atlantis a bazillion times. We saw the Shamu show and the girls got absolutely soaked. Since they were wet, we put them on the river rafting ride and they got even wetter, if that is possible. It was a fun, wet, entertaining, educational, and exhausting 24 hours.
Then we drove to a nearby Girl Scout camp ground and bunked up for the night before heading home (or to Aunt Fissa's in our case) the next day.
