SeaWorld, Day 1

After spending a number of hours at the Midway, we weren't sure what to do with the rest of our day. Thankfully we had purchased these nifty tickets which allowed us to go to SeaWorld, the Zoo and the Wild Animal Park as often as we wanted to for five days. So dropping by SeaWorld at the end of the day didn't set us back anything.

We managed to see the dolphin show and the Shamu show on Monday afternoon. One thing about SeaWorld is that the production value for their exhibits and shows is fantastic. Everything looks new, clean and cool. The backgrounds for all the shows were very well done. Here's where the dolphin show was.



The dolphins say "Hi", which is nice of them. Not that I had any fish to toss them.



Maybe I'm just odd, but I thoroughly enjoy taking pictures of shows like this. You know the animals are going to jump out of the water, but you're never exactly sure where, so you do your best to aim and focus the camera, and the CLICK! at the right time. And then, once you've taken the picture, you're sitting outside in the bright sun so you can't get a good view of the image on the little LCD display, so you have to wait until you get home and get the files on the computer to see what you got.

Like I said, maybe I'm odd.



Every once in a while I get the focus and aim correct.



I like this picture. I got the timing just right, with the dolphin just going over the rope, but it's completely off center. I could have cropped it for you, but that seems like cheating somehow.



This was some kind of goofy looking whale. Not sure why it was even in the dolphin show, especially since the dolphins continually made fun of him.



After the dolphin show we went to the Shamu show. It was extremely high quality production. I mean, look at that video screen!



The theme of this Shamu show was "Believe." After the show, the two main words Michelle and I used to describe it was "cheesy" and "shameless." For some reason, seeing whales jump in a tank wasn't enough to make me realize that I could do whatever I wanted to.



And don't even get us started about the boy who carves a piece of wood into a whale tail (which - amazingly! - you can buy attached to a stuffed Shamu whale). But, despite all that, Shamu is cool.



And the video screens! I would love to have four gigantic video screens, each of which can move and rotate independently of the others. Not sure where they'd go in my house, but still.



One thing we didn't like about the show is that we didn't get to know anything about the whales. As far as we know, they're all Shamu's. We don't know how big they are, or how old they are, or if they have any interesting likes and dislikes.



But still, they're very, very cool.



Michelle was actually able to do the audience participation in the show. Here is a picture of what she got to do.