Today was the Big Day, setting off for our Big Adventure at SeaWorld. In addition to our usual crew we had Bryson and Dawson along.Ashlyn was unable to sally forth due to other committments. She did a good job of hiding her deep, bitter disappointment, but I could tell she was heart broken. What 14 year old girl wouldn’t want to spend a couple of days couped up in a van and hotel room with her 12 & 8 year old brothers and cousins?
We got on the road on schedule (around 8 AM) for the long drive to San Antonio. The kids were tolerable, drugged in to slack jawed endurance by electronic games and Invader Zim. We took a longer route, up north and then back down, to avoid the rush hour Austin traffic as the most direct route is straight through the entire city. Still, we made it to SeaWorld in under 3 hours just before 11 AM, when most of the rides open (SeaWorld itself opens at 10 AM).
Mom took Charles and Alice off to do something or other while I served as a pack mule for the other boys. We were supposed to meet the others for a show at 1:30 but the kids got stuck in a line for a ride and didn’t finish until almost 2. First they waited in line for an hour, and then discovered they needed a parent along, so I had to find a locker and then hustle over to ride with them. At least they held a place at the front for the boys. As compensation, I let the boys put coins in the water guns set along the track so they could feel better by spraying random strangers on the ride as finished the last big drop. A woman, seeing their efforts, gave them some extra money to spray her family as she took pictures of it. So you can make money with water canons.
We met up for a very expensive lunch. My crew hit another ride and then went off to a ski show. During the show I got a frantic call from Zina’s mom about the power to our house having been turned off. The music was so loud that I couldn’t get far enough away to really hear but I finally got the gist. I tried to hustle the boys off to find Mom but of course, it was precisely at this time, out of the entire day, that she had gone off to the water park and had to leave her cell phone behind. I took the boys over to the water park which was a stressful operation as “hurry” was not a concept for which they were prepared. Eventually though I managed to get them set up in the water, Of course, Mom had called during this time but the noise and hurry had kept me from noticing. I was concerned because our basement gets a lot of water and Mom had told me that it had been raining hard back home and without power, we would have a flooded basement again. After multiple phone calls and Mom desperately searching for a spot in the park quiet enough to use a cell phone reliably, we got it straightened out. Due to a bank change over in their bill paying system, our payment was delayed, which caused a shut off yesterday but then the check arrived today so they turned it back on, without removing the “off” notice.
By this time the park was getting ready to close and Mom had Charles and Alice ready to go, but I figured we might as let the other kids finish off the day in the water. I asked Charles if he had had fun, and he said “maybe”, but “it would be a perfect day” if he went to the gift shop. Mom took him off to that but didn’t let him buy anything before he saw more of the park. I was left with the other boys, who managed to make leaving the water park such an effort that Mom called me a couple of times to verify that we were, in fact, trying to leave. In the end, though we made it out alive.
Mom, Charles, and Alice spent their time mostly on animals and shows. Charles was able to feed some dolphins and actually touch one. They saw some walruses, including a 1200 pound bull walrus, and saw a show with a pacific white sided dolphin1, the same species as Timmy from the Sleepy Time Crew. Alice’s primary new experience was getting her first brain freeze. Mom decided to buy them ice cream and there was only one size, really big. Alice consumed hers with such gusto that she froze her brain. It was an amazingly long lasting freeze, persisting for most of the rest of the day.
At the water park Alice was able to enjoy the water by herself with the aid of a life jacket. She even went down one of the medium sized water slides, although she didn’t like it much. There was a smaller one with just one loop at the child pool that she really enjoyed and would stand in line and ride it all by herself. Charles didn’t like the larger slide either, but didn’t ride the small one much either. He liked the floating objects in the kid pool best, followed closely by waves in the large wave pool (an Alice favorite as well).
After SeaWorld we went to the hotel and discovered that we had made our reservations for next week, but Mom was able to get them moved up. For dinner we went to Genghis Grill (at this location) because I really like that sort of food and Mom thought I deserved to get a break. The kids liked it very much, except for Charles, who hated all 12 different sauces (his preference would have been just plain fried rice). But even Charles loved the deserts.
P.S. Dawson was concerned about the hotel and whether it had a free breakfast because his parents had given him and Bryson some money and he didn’t want to run out and not be able to buy food. The hotel did have an included breakfast and so Dawson was saved from starvation.
I liked the ski show but the boys didn’t. However, when I was showing Mom the pictures later, the kids were asking “wow, when did they do that?”. Their main complaint, though, was they didn’t get any water sprayed on them by the performers which (as far as I can tell) was their main goal in attending.
1 Charles insists this is the other way round, that the cetacean in the show was a Timmy.