Day 3:
Our last few hours in Pacifica were spent waking up, eating breakfast, and scaling a miniature mountain for a picture. This quest, which was originally intended to be a simple little walk up the hill turned out to be a very fatiguing hike and took in all probably half an hour from start to finish. While trekking back down the hill, my siblings and I were educated in the velocity-slowing properties of deep sand. After this adventure, we set out in our trusty van for yet another expedition on the road. Our destination: Monterey. After spending an extra forty-five minutes stuck in traffic in the Santa Cruz mountains, we reached our afternoon's entertainment, the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Our family had visited this aquarium thirteen years ago, but, seeing as I was all of three at the time, I was able to take in the sights and sounds as if for the first time. We were able to see pretty much every exhibit during our time there, including: a giant octopus, a scary amount of jellyfish, moray eels, rock crabs, skeleton plankton, tiger sharks, bat rays, sea stars, the whole lead cast of Finding Nemo, sea otters, anchovies, sardines (not in a can), flatfish, and the like. One of the featured exhibits was on Seahorses, so we got to see an especially large amount of those. Unfortunately, one of the other featured exhibits, which lures in unsuspecting tourists with its catchy title (Hot Pink Flamingos), not only contained very few hot pink flamingos, but also was filled to the brim with environmentalist propaganda that looked like it could have come out of Communist Russia. O_O Not cool. Besides that sobering exhibit, the rest of our aquatic experience was very enjoyable and educational.
We dragged our exhausted feet back to our car, found our hotel, and unpacked for the last time. I was able to make a pretty cool makeshift bed out of a reading chair combined with two small couches intended to go with the room's main beds. After kicking back for a few minutes, we found out that X-Men: First Class was playing in a nearby theater...in half an hour. So off we go gallivanting to the theater with empty stomachs and tired feet. After the movie, we retired back to our hotel room, added onto our collection of “Day in Review” videos and then drifted off to sleep...
-Philip
