Yes, I do realize this post is a day late, but Mother's Day had to happen first before I could write about it.
We had a super amazing fun day at Discovery Cove!!
I guess my mom's Mother's Day present is a good place to start.
Growing up, my mom always read me Love You Forever
And it's always been our book/quote. Earlier this year there was a girl on campus selling personalized canvases, and I couldn't help but buy one with this quote on it for my mom.
Anyways, on to Discovery Cove. We ate a HUGE breakfast buffet at the park, and later struggled to get inside our wet suits
The park makes us wear either a wet suit or a vest whenever we're in the water. I initially picked wet suit, because I thought it looked really cool and professional. However, as soon as I felt the sun, I realized that I would get an AWFUL tan in that thing. So I opted for the less cute, but also less covering and easier-to-go-to-the-bathroom-in vest.
My tan is still pretty bad, but at least it's a little more even than it would have been in the wet suit.
We finally finished getting ready. Which involved a lot of squeezing into wet suits, squeezing out, trying on vests, over-applying sunscreen so people looked like mimes, and a
lot of laughing. We then went to swim in this awesome lazy river style river! The only difference was that we had to do the swimming so it wasn't really that lazy. Some of us had noodles, granny had a life vest, and rebels like Brian, Cinthia, and I just swam on our own. It wasn't that bad. Most of the river was shallow enough that we could walk, but there were some good long stretches of water that were too deep to touch the floor.
The water was really warm and clear blue. Of course, we wanted to take pictures, but didn't want to get our phones wet, so we had to get creative. We double zip-locked our phones and swam around with them inside our wet suits. I was really glad that we did this when we got to the aviary. Oh my goodness, that place was amazing!
There were little booths with park staff giving us bird food so we could feed the birds, it was awesome! When we first walked in the aviary, there was only on bird walking around and as soon as we had food in our hands, the place just came alive. It was beautiful. My personal favorite was the peacock.
Is that not the most gorgeous thing you have ever seen??
Look at the detail on it. It is so beautiful.
The fact that I was able to feed it was amazing. It ate my whole pot of food, then I went to get another pot of food and it ate that too! We got to see it open it's feather and do the whole majestic peacock thing. Unfortunately, I had just wrapped my phone back into it's Ziploc bags when it opened up, and by the time I got the phone out, it had put it's feathers back. It was probably one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen in person.
It was a day of beautiful things, because the dolphin was also a beautiful experience.
I can't put into words how remarkable of an experience this was.
The dolphin did all kinds of tricks and we got to touch it and 'talk' to it. It even gave us a ride around the pool area.
The shots that the cameramen at the park took came out amazing, but the kiss, that's from my camera, extremely zoomed in.
I have to admit, that was one heck of an experience! And I even got a shot of me and my little brother together with the dolphin (:
And even though only four of us actually got the whole dolphin experience, they had the rest of the family get in the water to take a picture of all of us together.
It really was an amazing experience, and I couldn't have asked for a better day with my family.
