Chattanooga II

The next morning we started with the River Journey at the Aquarium! The first exhibit was a seahorse exhibit. They are so cute! There were some that were as big as your pinky fingernail! TINY! And they were full grown!


(Let me say that the aquarium is very dark inside...but the tanks are lit up. And you don't want to use a flash - it'll bounce right off the glass and glare up your pictures! So getting pics was very hard. I had my 50mm 1.8 which is GREAT for low light, but it's a prime lense so you can't zoom in and out - I was stuck at one focal length the whole time. But I still think I got some good pics. So if some are out of focus, it was because it was so dark in there the camera had a hard time focusing!)






They had ALL the Finding Nemo fish in this tank!



Landon wanted there to be a diver in the tanks SO badly - he saw it on the brochure! And low and behold, a couple guys got in while we were there and started cleaning the tanks! He even posed for a picture with the kids!! haha Smiling and all! (he took out his oxygen!)



Landon didn't want to leave him.





In the Ocean Journey building, they had a whole exhibit where you could touch stingrays! I think it was one of their favorite parts. And the kids had NO problem reaching in there - in fact, the stingrays wanted to be touched. They would come up the side hoping you would rub their noses!!





This is in the butterfly exhibit..they are tracking butterflies. I thought this was cute because they were all by themselves with their little pamphlet, trying to find certain butterflies! They didn't know we were watching them! :-)









It's the littlest things they like so much....riding the escalators! Which Landon managed to fall on once!



The penguins were SUPER cute. They would float right up next to your faces...they were so friendly!!



The crab you see in front of them in the pic above is a Spider Crab. It was the size of a small lab. And when it spread it's claws, I bet it was 4 feet in diameter! I wouldn't want to come across one of those in the ocean!!



Above, a sturgent fish - this one was probably 5 or 6 feet long. They live in rivers and streams! And they get even bigger! AHH!





Blow fish! This one was big! Definitely bigger than our poodle!







At this point in the Ocean Journey, the water was all over our heads with little peep holes all over the place. This one, they could lay down and look up at all the fish!



The last pic of the day! Behind them is the bridge we walked across! :-) We had so much fun and would LOVE to go back in the spring or summer when it's super pretty outside! It looked like a very fun place to keep visiting!

I have a lot more pictures coming up - they're my favorite shots of the weekend! I hope you'll like them too!! :-)