Busch Gardens, Round 2!

Monday we got up early to see MaMa & PaPa off and to go fishing.  I caught one right away, but then we spotted a dolphin.  Maddie and I followed it down the beach, because it was SOOO close to the shore we just couldn't take our eyes off of it!  It was THE COOLEST thing ever - it would swim in close and then whip around around in a tight circle!  I'd never seen anything like it!  It did it two or three times, and I thought I captured it on video, but I didn't.  ;-(  After that, we fished for a bit more, but they just kept taking our bait.  We'll try again another day.  We spent the day in the water enjoying the beach.  We swam when the tide was out, and we found tons of sand dollars and star fish again.  SO cool!  We hit the bed pretty early tonight because we're getting up early tomorrow to head to Orlando; we're going to Sea World's Aquatica (water park).

Tuesday morning, we woke the kids up at 5:30 and hit the road by 6:00... we had a three hour trip to Orlando and wanted to get to the park as close to opening as possible.  The first slide we wanted to ride was the Dolphin Plunge.  Part of the slide is a clear tube that goes through a tank with Commercon Dolphins!  It was a LONG wait, and was pretty cool, but you zip past the dolphins pretty quickly.  It certainly wasn't the best ride.  While Aquatica didn't have as many rides as Adventure Islands, the ones they had were AWESOME.  We loved Walhalla Run (it felt like you were going to flip over or zip off the side!), and the Roa Rapids were AWESOME (like a lazy river on steroids).  The lines were long, but the slides were worth it.  It rained a little bit, but we took that time to eat lunch, and then the weather cleared out.  We had a beautiful, wonderful day!  We left early enough to get to Tampa, shower and eat at Chili's BEFORE the AGT quarter finals came on tv!  :-)

We were able to sleep in a bit Wednesday.  We got up around 7:30 and headed to Einstein Bros. for breakfast.  We made it to the park even before they opened the parking lot!  We made a bee line to Cheetah Hunt with plans to go ahead and ride it twice before the lines got too long.  We were second in line when wouldn't you know it... the voice came over the loud speaker announcing a temporary weather shutdown.  UGH.  45 minutes later, we get on thankfully, but so much for our plan.  We did our part this time, but c'est la vie.  One of our other favorite rides (Sheikra) was down all day until late afternoon, but then the line was an hour and never budged, so we never did ride it.  We rode everything else we liked twice for the most part, and Jeff and Matthew even rode the Pheonix (like the looping star ship six flags used to have -- no thank you).  I rode the Gwazi again, begrudgingly, and Jeff badgered me into holding my hands up - the whole time - in the front car.  I did it, and to my surprise I liked it better - it wasn't nearly as rough!  Gwazi is a FAST wooden coaster that really rocks your insides.  We were all pretty tired by early evening, so we opted to shower and eat instead of staying for the night show (especially since we got to see it last time).  We'd planned on staying, because it's really great, but we were whipped.  :-)

THURSDAY... water slides!  We went back to Islands of Adventure, and boy did our timing work out today!!  We got there when it opened, and within an hour and a half, we'd ridden everything we liked at least twice with NO wait!!  The only thing not open was Key West Rapids, and that ride didn't open until 12:30.  IT had a line, but it was worth it, we rode it twice and then left around 2!  We rode the Everglides (and I fell off of the dumb boat), RipTide (today I managed to stay rightside up on my little blue raft), Water Moccasin (especially #2 - the death drop), the Gulf Scream, the CorkScrew, Wahoo Run -- AWESOME stuff!  We had such a blast!  We were anxious to get back to the beach though!  We left there around 2, did a little sight seeing around Tampa and Clearwater.  We found out that Joey Chestnut was going to be in Clearwater at the Wing Eating Championships that day and went and checked out the location, but the competition wasn't until 7pm and we didn't want to hang around that long.  Pretty cool though!

When we got back to the condo, the sunset was proving to be incredible.  The kids and I decided to take a walk while Jeff worked on some emails, and we found shells like never before!!  It was crazy!!!  Jeff ended up joining us, and we collected a bucket full of fighting conch shells (empty of course), and then we found some whelk, some acorn shells and worm shells.  Some really cool stuff!  Can't wait to share with Gram and Mama!