We Made it to Seaworld!

***So y’all may have noticed I changed the name of the blog! Since it’s been over a year since I posted anything to do with our little farm and have just barely managed to post our wanderings, I wanted a name to reflect that. And I love alliterations! Gregarious carries 2 definitions that apply. Outgoing/friendly and herd/flock mentality. Lol! I’m pretty happy with this name, so I think it’ll stick. On to our fun at Seaworld now.

Ever since we learned of the changes Seaworld would be making to its Orca/Killer Whale program, getting back for one more show before 2019 went to the top of the travel list. The kids and I went for a day in 2014 when Ashlyn had just turned 5, Weston was 2.5 and Archer was 6 months old. Basically, the boys were jipped on that trip. Haha

An opportunity arrived in mid April as their season was starting up again for us to go on a weekday and avoid some crowds. While we had hoped Daddy would have made this trip, he had just started a new job and didn’t have time off yet. I spent a day deal hunting and ultimately purchased a package vacation through Seaworld that lumped my hotel and tickets together. I’m usually very skeptical of these packages, but this really was a deal and I highly recommend this route if you have a family in tow and want a comfortable hotel room. But call the vacation specialist and tell them specifically what you need. 30 minutes on the phone got me exactly what I was looking for, especially with ticketing, without overpaying by using the generic pull down bars on the website. I saved right at $200 using the package versus paying a-la-carte style and ended up in a significantly nicer hotel room than what I priced individually. And, no, Seaworld didn’t pay me to tell y’all that 😜.

So we headed out on Wednesday, April 11th and leisurely made our way to San Antonio checking into our hotel by 3. Our room was a 1 bedroom suite with a full size kitchen and queen pull out sofa in the living room. I told y’all it was freaking nice! Haha. So, of course, after unloading we hit up a HEB and stocked our kitchen. But, I didn’t even have to cook! The hotel provided a “grill out” dinner of hamburgers and hot dogs that night. Momma even enjoyed a free shiner bock draft beer with her meal!

Thursday morning, we were up, enjoyed a hot breakfast compliments of the hotel and waiting at the front gate of Seaworld when they opened at 9am. After they played the National Anthem, we were in and hit the ground running for I had the whole day scheduled to make as many shows as possible!

We learned that Seaworld will generally host 2 shows per exhibit in their park. One being an informative talk and another being more of a “show” with music and themes. So you can prioritize which show to see when based off timing and what is more appealing. For example, with the sea lions, we opted to go to the informative show first thing so that we could watch a pet show during the sea lion’s comedy themed show. We had 30 minutes to kill and there were no lines so we hopped on the Shamu Express for the kids first ride.

Archer absolutely hated it and couldn’t get off fast enough. Ashlyn and Weston went again in the front seat. We then were seated about 20 minutes before showtime for the Sea Lions. We soon learned that being that early for shows wasn’t going to be a big deal this day. We got first choice seating every time for the remainder of the day. The sea lions at play show was fun and informative! We learned the difference between seals and sea lions (mostly to do with ear flaps and mobility), fun facts about otters and the trainers had the animals show off their moves.

From there, we headed straight to another show across the park called Ocean Discovery. This one featured Pacific Dolphins, Beluga whales and Birds! It was definitely more “showy” and produced many “oohs and aahs” as dolphins leapt, beluga’s pushed trainers through water and birds did aerials above us.

It was well after lunch time after this show and we had just enough time for food before the first Killer Whale show of the day began. We picked a BBQ restaurant near the show’s auditorium so we would be right there. And, of course, I spent a stupid amount of money on very mediocre food, but whatcha gonna do? For the informative killer whale show, the kids opted for seats at the top of the clearly marked splash zone. We did get a light sprinkling towards the end, but it was worth it for the view. We learned a lot about the whale’s diets, habitats and behavior and they gave us a short bio and history on all the whales in captivity.

I made sure to get a shot of the kids’ faces when the whales did their first jump😍

After the show, they had a few whales still swimming about in the main pool and the kids went down to the edge for a photo op. I’m not sure if the trainer signaled that Whale or what but when he came by, he photo bombed the kids in an epic way! I especially like how Weston is just smiling all the way through it. He loves him some Orcas.

Amazingly, we had about an hour before a pet show began, so we convinced Archer to ride the Rio Loco Raft ride. It was a blast, we got soaked and Archer LOVED it!

Pets Ahoy was probably the most entertaining show of them all for both its length and sheer talent displayed by the menagerie of animals participating in it. The dogs, cats, rats, mice, birds, pigs, rabbits…I’m sure I’m forgetting some… all came from rescue and rehabilitation groups and were exceptionally trained. We laughed and cheered for it’s entirety.

On our way to the final killer whale show and the closing of the park, the kids scored a carousel ride and we did a quick walk through of the penguin exhibit.

For the One Ocean show, the kids opted out of the splash zone and we sat a few rows above it. This experience had much less talking and more music and elaborate jumps from the whales. The finale was one big splash fest where the whales went to each side of the pool and DRENCHED the splashzones with walls of water produced by their tales. Those people all went home smelling like salt water no doubt. I appreciated the kids not making us one of them.

And just like that a full 8 hours in the park came to an end. We made dinner in the hotel room and called it an early night. The next morning at breakfast we talked about how we couldn’t believe the crazy amount of hustling it took to make all the shows in one day. The kids were disappointed that they didn’t get to ride more or spend more time just looking at the exhibits. There was also a whole area of the park that housed more dolphins that we didn’t even get to!

So the decision was made to go back Friday morning! Haha. It was an easy decision to make, really. The tickets I purchased through the package were multi day passes and the only thing we had for the day was to get home by a reasonable hour. I told the kids we would go for an hour or so, check out the dolphin section and head home… FOUR HOURS later we finally said good enough 😆.

The dolphin area was beautiful and newly renovated, the kids got to redo a few rides and added on some new ones, we fed the sea lions while checking them out up close and watched the Pets Ahoy show one more time.