Georgia Aquarium

In celebration of President's Day (aka Dale's last three-day weekend in Alabama), we went on a mini-vacation to Atlanta. On our itinerary were visits to the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola.

I'll be splitting the trip up into multiple blog posts so I can cover the entire weekend, so I'll start at the beginning. We pre-bought our tickets to the aquarium at the Soldier Services Center on post, which aside from being cheaper, turned out to be the greatest decision we made on the trip. We apparently picked the busiest day ever to go the the aquarium and the line just to get tickets could rival the longest line at Disney World. It was seriously insane.

We got in fairly fast, having the pre-bought tickets, and the place was seriously pretty cool. The place was divided up into multiple exhibits: Ocean Voyager, River Scout, Cold Water Quest, Georgia Explorer, Tropical Diver, Georgia Explorer, and Dolphin Tales, which closed for renovation.

The worlds largest aquarium exhibit, the Ocean Voyager, was HUGE! It holds 6.3 million gallons of water, has a 100-foot-long underwater tunnel, and a ginormous viewing window. It's big enough that it has whale sharks, ya, the biggest fish species in the world. Parker loved seeing the sharks and the manta rays, which he called man rays thanks to ol' Spongebob Squarepants.

The Cold Water Quest highlights, were a tank of beluga whales and a walk-through tunnel with pop-up windows that was built into the penguin exhibit. Macy and I had to skip that one, but judging by the pictures, it looks pretty cool.

The River Scout exhibit was pretty so-so until you looked up. They literally had aquariums over your head so that you could see the river fish from below. FYI, sturgeons and catfish look super strange from the view below. There was also a big tank of pirana's and some river otters in their own exhibit.

Macy even had a good time looking at the fish :)

The Georgia Explorer had a sweet pool where people could reach in and touch sting rays and leopard sharks. Parker kept his hand in the water and thought he was so cool when he got to touch a shark! He also got to drive a ship and slide down a whale slide in this area. He would have had a better time, except he went into a play area where the only way out was to go down a long swirly dark slide and that part really scared him.

I don't have any photos of the Tropical Diver exhibit, but Dale says it's just a bunch of jellyfish, so I guess it's not a big deal. Macy had a freakout moment when we started to go into it, so she and I stayed out in the common area of the aquarium.

Overall, we had a fantastic day at the aquarium. Macy had to be held the entire time, but she did pretty good for the most part. Parker LOVED the place and wanted to go back again the next day. I'm glad we were able to take advantage of living so close and being able to just make a quick trip to Atlanta to visit such an awesome place. One thing's for sure, Henry Doorly Zoo's aquarium is no longer going to be as cool as it used to be.