Today we return home to North Carolina after seeing Dr Bruce yesterday in Washington, DC. But before we headed out of town, we decided to return to the National Aquarium in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as a treat for Nicholas.
We had visited the Inner Harbor yesterday to see where everything was (and let Nicholas run off some of his energy which is usually quite boundless). It’s a very nicely redeveloped area not just a bit east of Johns Hopkins University and Camden Yards which is the home park of the American League’s Baltimore Orioles. Oriole Park is a pretty stadium which served as the model used to build the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.
They’ve got everything you can imagine down there: restaurants (including Baltimore’s Hard Rock Cafe), shops, museums, and of course…expensive parking!
But our destination today was the aquarium and according to Mommy, it’s much larger than it used to be when she went to university north of Baltimore at Goucher College. Apparently, they’ve added on to the main building as well as built a new pavilion across the street connected by a pedestrian bridge. They are currently constructing a recreation of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia which should be open later in the year.
We grab our tickets and check the stroller (darn!) and head into the building. You start out at the big tank with sharks and stingrays and work your way up to the top of the building. All along the way are various and sundry exhibits (we found Nemo!)…then you start down a ramp where you are surrounded by tanks and it’s almost like you’re swimming with the sharks all the way down. If they do the Barrier Reef exhibit anything like this one, it will be amazing. It’s obvious that they were shooting for a world-class aquarium and they succeeded hands-down.
Then it was across the pedestrian bridge to watch the dolphin show. And that show is fantastic and nothing like what you’d see at Sea World. It was actually quite educational…it takes quite a commitment to train the dolphins to do the tricks and that’s with an animal that is awfully intelligent to start with. One of the dolphins that performed that day was awfully pregnant…as in, birth is imminent! If you needed further proof that females are indeed the stronger, here is this dolphin that is within days of delivering her calf and she’s still leaping for the ceiling and doing awfully well at it.
Normally, you don’t tend to expect much of an almost two year old’s attention span. We were in the aquarium for over four hours and Nicholas was so fascinated with the exhibits that it was a surprise to all of us just how long we’d been there and how attentive he was. I do believe a return trip is in order the next time we find ourselves in the Baltimore area. Hopefully, Daddy will be a bit more ship-shape than he was on this particular outing…let’s just say that certain lyrics from Stan Rogers’ Wreck of the Athens Queen (a song about drunken salvagers braving high seas to loot a ship that foundered upon the rocks in coastal Canada) were quite apropos. You know, the bit that goes like well, the waves inside me belly were as high as those outside…
Unfortunately, it was time to get on the road and head home. That took a little more doing when Daddy missed an important turn and gave an impromptu tour of downtown Baltimore. But soon enough, navigation was sorted out and we were heading south. At that time, we could imagine the mess that was the Beltway traffic in Washington so we decided to head further south and cross the Potomac on the US-301 bridge (the Governor Nice bridge…at a nice $3.00 toll, thankyewverymuch).
But the rest of the drive was uneventful with a stop for dinner in Richmond and before we knew it we were back home in North Carolina. It was a quick and exhausting trip but it was well worth it for all of us.
