Since Easter fell so early this year, I had Good Friday off from work, and I wanted to do something special for the girls. So Friday comes along and I start looking at the listings for the theater. The only movie showing on Friday was Horton Hears a Who, and I took the girls to see that last weekend. Plan foiled. However, I was not giving up so easily. I started looking at stuff to do and decided on a train trip to the West End in Dallas and a trip to the Dallas World Aquarium. I had errands to run, and one including getting some stuff that I left at my Office on Thursday. There is a train station not far from my office and since I got my truck (blog to come), I am always looking for a way to save gas. After I planned out our route, I told Steph the plan (she thought I was crazy, [I told you last time she thinks most all of my plans are crazy]) and kept it a secret from the girls. I told them we had several things to do, and that two of them were secrets. So here is our plan:
· Drive by my office
· Drive to the train station at Forest lane
· Walk to the Dallas World Aquarium where we ate lunch and toured the Aquarium
· Walk back to the train station
· Take the truck to Toys R Us – Emyley wanted to look at Weebles
· Stop at Target to get some dog food
· Take the girls to Starbucks for a snack
· Go home
Piece of cake.
I won’t write everything about the Aquarium since I am having all the girls write a story about the trip, but I will hit the high points for me, and put some pics I took with Steph’s new camera!
The train: was very fun for the girls despite the fact it was packed and we had to stand most of the way.
The trip route for the Aquarium that I printed off had us taking a bus from the train station, to the aquarium, but it was a nice day and I thought we could walk to the aquarium. It was not far, but I led us on a big circle that forced us to walk further then we needed to, and the girls let me know they were tired of walking. So we get to the Aquarium and we see the education entrance, and a line that led around the building. I figured it was just a short line, since we were right by one of the entrances. The line moved quickly and as we made our way around the first wall I noticed a small laminated sign on a tree. It read: “NOTICE: Remember it is spring break and the Aquarium is busy, it is a 45 minute wait from this point”. Great! We were going to stand in line another 45 minutes. It didn’t take that long and we quickly moved to the entrance. It was very crowded. It was all of us first trip so we had no idea what to expect. I bought our tickets, and we were ushered up the stairs to the Aquarium. When we got to the top of the stairs, we had a choice of which way to go, right was the rainforest (yay!) or left was the restaurant. It was lunch time, so I thought it would give us a chance to rest our legs, recharge our batteries, and get some food in us to power our trip through the Aquarium. It was probably the best Idea I had all day. We sat right down and the restaurant was not crowded at all. So we ate lunch, since the Aquarium is Mayan theme, we had Mexican food. I had a very good taco salad, Hayley and Emyley both had chicken strips (very Mayan btw), and Sydney had some chicken nachos. Now everyone had a full tummy, and we were able to rest our feet. The restaurant overlooked the shark tank and part of the rainforest. It was very cool. We paid our tab, made a pit stop and were on our way.
Like I said, I will let the girls tell you all about the aquarium so I will just touch on some highlights.
The rain forest was first, I saw a beautiful reddish orange bird taking a bath in the waterfall.
There were monkeys and lots of birds to look at.
As we were leaving the rainforest we noticed a young couple taking pictures of a bird on the railing. I had the girls go stand by it so I could take a picture. As I was getting the camera ready, it pecked Emyley on the head causing a minor freak out on her part. The picture of Hayley is after the pecking incident, notice she is not too close to the bird.
We saw some tiny monkeys
Some neat turtles (Emyley loves turtles and frogs)
We saw a huge crocodile.
Then we were looking at some hammerhead sharks and sea turtles when a young lady arrived with a bucket. She started feeding the sea turtles whole squids. It was very cool.
Sydney loves penguins so we headed to the penguin habitat.
Sydney had heard from her friends that there was a tank that you could walk under. We found that and walked in. The tank was huge, crowded, and awesome! There were several very large sharks swimming right over us, very threatening and very, very awesome!
One of the coolest animals was the Jaguar, and Steph loves cats, so I tried to take a picture, but none came out because the flash reflected on the glass, and the jaguar was pacing quite rapidly.
However, I got a great little movie so here it is.
That’s about it for the aquarium. So we walked back to the train and headed to Toys R Us. They had their Easter candy on sale, so we stocked up, everybody got some and we were on our way to Target.
We got the dog food, and some other staples, and were off to Starbucks.
Thursday at work, I went to a lunch and it had a March Madness theme. At the start of the meeting, they asked several trivia questions for Starbucks gift cards. I got two correct and received two $10 gift cards. So we had never been so it was quite an adventure for us. We got a couple cinnamon rolls, I got a slice of banana chocolate chip coffee cake. Sydney and Emyley got chocolate milk, and Hayley and I got hot cocoa (I don’t drink coffee). We relaxed and enjoyed our snack and talked about our big day. Lots of fun! Here's a video of our day!
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