Sea World

It has been a long time since we had a FAMILY vacation...I'm excluding camping trips which we take a few a year. Last trip was Disney when I was pregnant with the twins 4.5 years ago. Plan A this year was to go to Utah, but that did not work out so we wanted to go somewhere closer. We considered Galveston and San Antonio....we picked San Antonio since our kids had never been there, and I can't remember going ever.

During our planning phase we hits some bumps...mainly our vacation funds had to be spent on car repairs (3 times in May!!!!) But then I explored using reward points from our credit cards. For years we have been accumulating them what better way to spend them. I felt pretty good paying for the hotel room and Sea World tickets with reward points. We only had to spend for meals, parking and little things like that. I am frugal and I can be proud of it!!!

We had an AWESOME time. We got fun passes so we could go over several days for one price. We drove the 3 hours, checked into the hotel, then had an early dinner and hit the park deciding to do the Summer Night shows on a day we did not spend all day in the park. Good call....every other day our kids were very tired and would not have made late nights.

C was excited to be able to ride roller coasters, boys were a bit more timid. Maybe it was because the first one we went on, Journey to Atlantis, we got wet. R did not like that at all. It made him cry and mad. A, T & S on the other hand loved it and wanted to go again. Their favorite ride (all the boys) was Shamu Express which we did every day, sometimes more than once. The shows that first night were really cool. Sea lions were funny. My boys wanted to see the Orcas, they never did call them Shamu. Watching Diego taught them they were Orcas. So a few rollar coasters and 2 shows and the first night left them wanting more....only complaint. Tired feet!

The next full day we decided to make our wet day and we wore our bathing suits planning on spending part of the day in the water park there. We did start the day by feeding the dolphins which the kids thought was really cool. All except A, he wanted to ride the Shamu Express first and was protesting against feeding the dolphins, his loss. We tried to convince him to no avail. So after riding his ride we went to the water park and had fun on the tube rides and wave pool there. (Splashtown near us is better) We left the water park late afternoon to do some of the splashing rides in the main Sea World park. The lines were a bit long (45-1 hour) but we pretty much got them all done. The one the twins were too small for they got ice cream while they waited.

The 3rd day we decided to plan it so we could catch all the shows we had not seen yet. The older boys liked the 4 D theater and we saw all 3 shows they did there. We sat in the splashzone of Shamu because the kids wanted to get wet, but we went prepared with ponchos to cover us and R. After the inital Splash S hid under it as well. The Shamu shows were not the best. I preferred the Sea lion shows that told a story and were funny. The new Azul show with beulga whales and divers and arialist was my favorite. I think over the 2.5 days we did everything there was to do at Sea World and had a great time and built great memories!!

We planned one extra day and went to the Alamo the next morning before heading home. It was interesting but the little guys did not want to stay long. We had done some prep work and got library books for the older kids to read before we went so they knew the history and went looking for some things they heard about.

It was a fun time for all of us.....makes me want to start planning our next trip. Where should we go???