Carter got up a little later at 6 am. When he got up, the poor kid's face was swollen and red. I really still think it was wind burn though because it was only on his nose and cheeks and his skin felt hard. That's where I did his sunscreen the best too. It didn't seem to bother him at least.
We left the hotel around 8:15 am so Carter could get a short nap again on the way to Sea World. He probably slept about 15 minutes which wasn't a lot, but enough. We were walking up to the gate just as the park was opening again.
On Wednesday, a trainer was killed at Sea World by one of the killer whales. Because of this, the Believe show featuring the killer whales was canceled. Also, the underwater viewing area of the whales was closed. There weren't any signs around explaining anything or anyone that worked there talking about it but it was hard to miss the news vans parked outside the gates of the park.
It was cold again on Friday morning. It was in the mid 40s but the wind was much lighter so it was a lot nicer than Thursday. I'm not sure if Sea World decided to have a different character out this morning because it was cold or because of what happened on Wednesday. Either way, this guy was pretty cute ...
Brian was planning on riding Manta first thing again, but for some reason the ride wasn't open yet (maybe because it was cold?). So we walked around for a little bit and looked at the flamingos and sea turtles. Then we walked through the aquarium for the Manta ride.
Brian and Carter outside of the aquarium ...
The octopus in the aquarium was moving around a lot giving us a good view of his legs ...
Next we headed over to Dolphin Cove to watch people feed the dolphins. It looked like it could be fun, but we didn't want to pay $7 each for a few fish. From the viewing area, we eventually saw Manta running so we headed back over to the ride. Brian got to ride in the front of the ride again. Carter really liked watching the Manta ride still though he wasn't as thrilled as he was earlier in the week. He still did lots of pointing at it.
We headed toward the back of the park and there was no line for Kraken, the other roller coaster, so Brian rode that ride too (in the front again). He liked this ride enough, but Manta was much better.
We then went to the Penguin Encounter and Pacific Point Reserve. Carter looked at everything but wasn't all that excited. He did point out the sea lions though.
Carter still didn't want me to hold him and only wanted Brian.
The park was still pretty empty since it was early so when we got over to the children's area, we got to ride the carousel all alone. The children's area is next to the Shamu Stadium that was closed so that probably helped to keep it empty as well.
We went of to Wild Arctic next. Brian rode the simulator ride while Carter and I headed straight to the animal viewing area. There were beluga whales, a polar bear, and walruses here. There were above and below water viewing areas for all of the animals.
The walruses were really cool. They were HUGE. When we were at the above water viewing area, one of the walruses seemed to try to play with Carter. It was playing with a large half ball that it would pull under the water with it and then let it pop back up to the surface. Once it threw it at the window toward Carter. Then it had to come out of the water some to retrieve it. It seemed like it wanted to play with Carter though.
Isn't this guy cool?
If you turn up the volume, you can hear the walrus making a cool whistling sort of sound ...
Brian caught up with us just as we were finishing up. We hurried over to the Whale and Dolphin Theater to see the Blue Horizons show again. We made it about 5 minutes before the show started so we didn't have as good of seats but they weren't bad. Carter really liked the show again (feeding him grapes through out the show helped some too).
Here's another video of Carter watching the show ...
After the show, we felt like we'd seen everything at Sea World so we headed out. We left around 12:15 pm. Carter fell asleep immediately when we got him in the car. We took our time finding a place for lunch and ended up just going to Moe's.
After lunch we headed over to the Orlando Science Center. Before we left, I got an annual membership to the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge. The family membership was only $35 and it has an amazing reciprocal program allowing us to get in to a bunch of other museums for free that cost a lot more than our local museum. The Orlando Science Center is one of the museums that we get into for free with this membership. It costs $17 per adult admission so we essentially paid for the membership with this one visit.
We really liked this museum. Brian and I had a lot of fun in the Science Park section playing with all of the science demonstration stations.
One of my favorite (and Carter's favorite) things was the hurricane wind simulator.
Carter liked watching the cars go down this race track ...
Brian and Carter had fun on this earthquake simulator ...
There was also a neat flight simulator ...
Carter loved running around this area. The demonstrations were really spread out and it wasn't very crowded in the afternoon (probably because all the school groups had already left).
Carter found lots of stuff to play with ...
His favorite things though were stairs. He liked trying to go up them like he was a big kid.
Carter was not a fan of the dinosaur exhibit area so we didn't really get to look at them. I did manage to get one good picture of him with Brian though. There was a man on a ladder in the area and I think Carter really wanted to play on it so he was trying to get away from us the whole time.
Carter really liked the tree house play area, probably because of the stairs though ...
We got to the museum around 2 pm and left around 4:15 pm. Carter fell asleep again right away in the car. We headed back to the hotel to take a break and get food for Carter for dinner. We went to Fuddrucker's for dinner so we didn't have to worry about Carter being loud. When we got back to the hotel we got some packing done and got Carter to bed around 7:45 pm.
We had another fun day. We were sad our vacation was over but were also worn out so we felt good about heading home (even though we knew we weren't going to catch up on any sleep since we were headed out for San Francisco right away!).
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