10 Dec 2016
[07:07 EST+1]
I'm writing this the day after (Sunday morning) as by the time we'd got back and I had uploaded the photos, I was almost asleep at the keyboard!
Initially, we'd awoken around about 5am US time, so no too bad really. We had breakfast and waited for the sun to come up. Then we went around preparing for the trip out to Sea World.
Once ready, we got our first day light look at the apartment we're staying in.
We're on the right of the stairwell, ground floor.
We arrived at Sea World at 11am, despite it being a Saturday, the parking area didn't seem that busy. Despite us ending up at the far end of a parking line, we were not too far from the entrance.
As expected, the place was well decorated and we've got loads of decorations photos in the album below.
We first had to do some queuing to pick up a set of tickets giving us reserved seating at four evening shows. Linda had spotted them online a while back and this really paid for itself later as it would likely have been impossible to see all that we saw in the single day.
We wandered into the park and almost straight away stopped and got something to drink and a nibble to eat.
We then went further into the park, looking at all the decorations and the trees which were in the main lake.
The dolphins were out in their pool and some were in training
Manta, Kraken and Mako (new ride to me) were running but I'd wanted to ride Escape from Atlantis, but it was dry and undergoing maintenance until next year.
New to us was the revamped Penguin Experience which was similar to before, but now they have done away with the glass partition between us and the penguins, this meant that the temperature was very cold in the main viewing area, but on the plus side, small penguins were swimming past just a foot away from us.
We ended up at the back of the park by late afternoon, where we stopped at a place by the lake for a small lunch. The sun went down soon after.
After that, it was off to the first of the shows.
The tickets we'd bought were supposed to guarantee us access (up to 15 minutes before the show start) to each of four evening shows.
The first was the usual Clyde and Seamore sea lion show, this one with a Christmas theme. I've always enjoyed this show anyway, especially the mime they have before the start of the show.
We were a number of rows back, but pretty central. Once over, we hot footed it over to the nearby Nautilus Theatre where the O Wonderous Night show was to take place on the hour (giving us 30 minutes to get seated). This is where the tickets came to the rescue, when we'd been near the area before, the pre-queue for the earlier show (about 40 minutes before it started) was probably a half mile long. It just seemed to go on forever, so there's no way we'd have got into that show after leaving the sea lions. However, the tickets got us past this new long queue and we were in the 4th or 5th row.
The show was a take on the nativity story, similar to the Rockette show we'd seen in New York. That included the live animals, camels included.
From there is was on to the Shamu show, we needed to search a little bit to find the reserved seating area, but we were in place well before it started.
Finally, just down the way was the last show of the evening for us, an ice skating show. This was very good, despite the apparently small size of the rink. The trees all around the lake were used as a synchronised back-drop to the show, so the lights were changing in time with the music.
Some of the skating was quite impressive.
Finally, we walked through a couple of areas which were all now lit up with Christmas decorations. It was all very festive.
We decided not to wait to get a photo with Rudolph when we found out the wait was close to 45 minutes from where we were. We were starting to flag by then.
So we walked back down to the car, passing the now-lit big tree by the entrance.
All in all, a good day.
FULL PHOTO ALBUM : https://goo.gl/photos/w1vv3bYtLcpEUt1q6