Monterey Bay Aquarium

About a month ago, Chris surprised me with a day trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium! We live about a two hour drive away from Monterey, and the journey out there is absolutely beautiful. California is a pretty place, there's no denying it. We drove the entire thing in our spiffy new Honda CRV, as a matter of testing her road-tripping capacities of course, and I must say she is a keeper.

As for the actual content of the aquarium...two thumbs up from us!! Here are some pictures, because my grasp on the English language is not at its' peak tonight:

 itty bitty jellies!

 baby sea turtle!

 Jellyfish exhibit NUMBER TWO! With psychadellic Hendrix-esque music blasting the entire time. I was stoked. If you couldn't already tell, I kind of love jellyfish.

 these little guys moved FAST. which is weird for a jellyfish. but they looked rubbery and bounced around like crazy bouncy balls and were super fun to watch.

 the octopus was feeling shy today :(

can you spot the crab???

Anyway, I pretty much only photographed jellyfish, because I love them and also because my phone died. But luckily I wasn't the only one documenting our adventures that day....

 Chris brought a sketchbook along! :) I love his sketches.

And okay, I guess we both kind of love jellyfish.

There were a lot more awesome things in the aquarium - apparently they even had a Mantis Shrimp in one of the exhibits! We went on a quest to find it, but failed, because apparently it was in the kiddie "Coral Crawl Tunnel" that we didn't venture into because we thought maybe we were too old for that business and also we were taking turns wearing Daisy.
Speaking of Daisy, she looked pretty darn cute, but in the only picture we remembered to take of her, she looks kind of stoned [it was just the sunlight, I swear!]:

Our little explorer is still kind of upset about how the sun gets in her eyes.

Anyway! We both loved it. I think Daisy even enjoyed it - especially the super long nap she took in the sling...the aquarium lighting was dark and the sling was cozy so she was a pretty happy camper.

We'd love to go back to downtown Monterey and explore some more sometime - it looks so interesting! Unfortunately we were so beat by the time we finished the aquarium, all we had enough energy for was to pop into a cinnamon roll bakery that was on our way back to the car and grab a couple rolls. Which were extremely delicious, by the way.

Those were the days. What a great way to celebrate Chris' last week of freedom before heading back to work. [he ended up having the entire month of May off, due to film schedule shifts, and we were able to use the rest of his "paternity leave" and hang out with him every day! It was soooo nice. So so so nice. Sometimes I miss those days, but I'm glad to have a schedule back again too :) ]