Monterey Bay Aquarium

Saturday was awesome. One of the things that has been on our list of things to do is go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, you hear such cool things about it, just had to go! But as everything in our lives, money has always been the issue.
Luckily we have some good people in our family that think of us in these cases. My sister-in-law Virginia and her husband Eli planned a trip this past week, getting a room at a local spot and part of their package was tickets to the aquarium. They didn't realize until they arrived that the packages was for 2-day passes. Friday morning as I'm surfing the net, she calls with the fabulous news that if we can get ourselves there, we could go on Sat, all we needed to do was pay for the kids. Squeal!!!!
So we planned and things came together. Purchased Cody's ticket online, Ty is free until Aug, and hopped in the car early Sat am.

It's such a cool area that the aquarium is located, we were able to walk around a bit and see the shops, see the ocean, and enjoy the cooler weather.

Lots to see inside, here are the divers cleaning the tank where the kelp gardens are, lots of cool fish and some small sharks.

There are a ton of interactive exhibits as well, making it super kid friendly as an aquarium should be. Here you are able to change the current and watch the fish change the direction that they swim.

Wave tunnel....

crashed onto us!

The touch pools are neat as well. Cody loves starfish, so he was able to see some up close. He wasn't real keen on touching them at first, but eventually gave it a try.

They also had a few birds on exhibit, ones that would live in the coastal areas. These little guys in the back were bathing in the water, making big splashes, too cute.

A couple of shallow tanks that you can look down into and see things like rays and other flat swimming fish.

Shark, Yikes!

We moved upstairs to see the penguins as well.

More interactive toys, this is another about currents and waves.

From this point we were hungry, so we had our hands stamped and headed off to find some food. We parked about 6 blocks or so from the aquarium and walked passed a favorite Mexican restaurant. So after walking around a bit, we decided that was as good a place as any to have lunch. It turned out to be perfect, just enough off the path that it was packed with people. The views from our booth were awesome, looking out right over the ocean. This is apparently a good diving spot as there was lots of activity and also a lot of people out on kayaks. If you looked out into the distance, you could spot many sailboats as well.

After lunch we went back and headed over to where the Jelly fish were. Here's one of the tanks before that, showing different schooling fish.

Creepy...

Then headed over to the outer bay area where the larger sharks, hammerheads, huge tuna's and other big fish live. Very cool 3 story tanks.

Then came the seahorse exhibits. Amazing. They are very calming things to watch.

All around there are places where you can go outside and look around, they also have telescopes to view things way out. Here's the back of the aquarium.

Our last stop inside was to watch what we thought would be a video about sharks. It turned out to be more of a lecture with slides, but lots of questions and answers and the boys seamed to be okay with that. Once that was over, we were done! We saw most everything, only leaving out a small portion of the Otter exhibits, just too many people once we were back from lunch.


We walked back along Canary Row to see the shops some more, getting our souvenir smashed pennies, stopping at the Toll House store for a treat, then found a small beachy area to get our feet wet.
We hopped back into the car and headed for home. Such a great day, even as long as it turned out to be. We will go back, camping for a couple days next time so we can enjoy the area a bit more.