Monterey Trip Day 3

I had planned to post some stuff this morning, but the DSL at the hotel was down and the dial-up was useless. I finally packed up everything for the trip home and figured I'd get back to it later.

Today was the last day of our brief sojourn to Monterey, and the big item of the day was a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The facility used to be an old cannery, and still kind of looks that way out back:


Star Trek fans will remember the Aquarium from Star Trek 4 (when the crew returned to the 20th Century to pick up a couple of whales). It's a large facility with a number of huge display tanks including the very impressive kelp bed tank which rises about 40' up:

The Outer Bay exhibit is a very large tank complete with hammerhead sharks, yellowfin tuna (those suckers get pretty big), and a couple of these:

That's an Ocean Sunfish, and the thing is probably 6' or more across. It's the weirdest engineering job I've ever seen. God must have been in a funky mood when he designed these things.

It was good to have both kids with us since most of the trip the boy was off with his jazz band. This was his first visit to the Aquarium, and since he's a fishing fan, this is right up his alley (though they wouldn't let him drop a line in the tank with the Steelhead Trout).

The drive home was long but thankfully uneventful. We left Monterey about 12:30 pm and arrived home at 6:30 after slogging though some of the usual L.A. traffic.

Tomorrow I'm back to regular blogging...for a couple of weeks and then we're off to Las Vegas for a few days.