SeaQuest

John had a conference in SLC, so we all went with him. Free hotel, right? While John was in his conference on the first day, we used my handy Groupon to try out SeaQuest in Layton. It's a small aquarium, but it has some amazingly fun interactive activities. You have to use tokens to try many of them, but my coupon included enough to try out the main things in which we were interested.

At one of the first exhibits, the man below told the kids about the octopus there, and had them try touching its tentacle. I mentioned that Tori was thinking about becoming a marine biologist, so then he took a real interest in the kids, and gave them a behind-the-scenes tour. He told them all kinds of things, like how they get the water to the right temperature and salinity, how they change the lighting during the day, etc.

After he showed them around, he gave them something to feed the fish in the next exhibit.

My favorite thing was feeding the parakeets. They gave each of the kids a little bit of food, and the birds just flocked to them. They landed on their heads and pecked at their shoelaces. We were all laughing. It was just...really fun.

The stingray exhibit was wonderful, because people regularly use their tokens to get food for them, so the stingrays came right up to the kids, even without food. They pet them for quite a while.

The kids loved this! These are little cleaning fish, and they swarmed around the kids' hands. It was a little too tickly for me, but the kids insisted it was relaxing.

We got food for the stingrays later, but I only have a shot of Eli trying to eat it.

We used our last tokens on the little parakeets again, as well as the larger lorikeets.

An employee brought out a big ball python that they all held.

 We had a really enjoyable time. We just don't get out to these kinds of places as often as we used to.