Thursday, August 14, 2014

Galveston Vacation Day 4

Our original plan for Thursday was to return to the beach, however Kate and Trey both decided they had had enough of the beach. Trey was starting to get just a tad too red, and Kate scrunched up her face and said "That water is just so.....salty. It gets on my skin." So rather than drag them both out there and listen to them complain all day, I decided to take them to the Moody Gardens Aquarium. Mom and Richard headed back to the beach alone for the afternoon. But before we could leave for the aquarium, we had to go downstairs and play putt putt on the hotel's free course. It was Kate's first time playing. Her form needs a little bit of work, but I think that's Daddy's domain so I just let her do her thing.
The Moody Gardens grounds are pretty awesome - very nice landscaping and three pyramids housing different attractions. The aquarium is located inside the big blue pyramid. Right away Kate was super excited because of that. When you enter the aquarium, you are not on the bottom level of the pyramid but up towards the top, and the different areas of the aquarium sort of spiral off from this central lobby.
Because of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, the aquarium gave us each a shark passport to get stamps in as we toured the facility. They also had a special shark exhibit, although it could be something that is always there and I just assumed it was special. I really have no idea. It was cool either way. The kids enjoyed looking for the stamp stations, and we even had to go back through the whole aquarium once we finished because we had somehow missed a stamp.
After the aquarium, we had some time to kill before we needed to meet up with Mom and Richard for our evening bay cruise, so the kids and I headed down to the seawall to get some ice cream and walk around a little bit. They wanted to walk out on a fishing pier to watch the waves (which were much bigger than Tuesday when we were at the beach, so they really would not have enjoyed themselves) so we attempted to do that but the pier we were on charged you $3 per person to walk out there. Whatever. So we just walked along the free seawall instead and guess what? We didn't spend any money at their gift shop, although I was planning to, because I was highly annoyed at the $3 charge to walk on a pier.
After we met up with Mom and Richard again, it was time to head back over to Moody Gardens to board the Colonel Paddlewheeler, a replica 1800s paddlewheel boat that takes you on an hour-long cruise in Offatts Bayou. We did the 7pm cruise, which meant we had an amazing sunset show while we cruised. We enjoyed ourselves and it wasn't a bad little cruise for the money.

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