Sea World and Post-Celebration Dinner

Thanks to friend and co-pacer Laura, I was able to enjoy an afternoon at Sea World for the low cost of merely paying for parking. I had never been there before, and was surprised with some of our prior conversations about the park that it had any rides; I always thought it was solely a park that showcased animals. Au contraire.

They have lockers for rent at all of their rides, as well as open cubbies at the platform. Sorry, but there's no way I'm going to trust that my cash, credit cards, phone, Celebration Marathon finisher's medal, and even glasses would not be touched (or in the case of my glasses - crushed) in the cubbies, so rent-a-locker it was. Alas, given how the first locker bank we tried to use was not behaving and we didn't want to worry about that happening at multiple rides, we wound up getting just one locker (rather than moving about), which meant I had to leave my glasses inside the locker until we were finished with the rides.

As the weather had been really cold during the preceding week, the fact that it was about 60 degrees after the race meant that seemingly EVERYONE decided they needed to hit the park, so it was very busy. The posted times on each of the rides were at least 60 minutes. (It didn't help that 1 or 2 of the rides were broken down, thereby not helping to spread out some of the ride-going patrons.) We took a chance on a couple of them, and the lines were mercifully a bit shorter (maybe 30-45 minute wait instead).

There was one more ride to go on, and I was able to take advantage of their version of a FastPass (though Laura couldn't join - which she was ok with). This one starts off by shifting the car over to the right to be pushed backwards first, before rocketing forward for a crazy-brief (though somewhat fun) ride. Had I been on line for the posted wait time (90 minutes), I would have been pissed that it was such a short ride (maybe 30 seconds?).

At this point, with other rides either shut down or more kiddie-ride oriented, we decided to go through a couple of the animal venues. How could I go to Sea World without seeing some of those adorable animals?

Amusingly enough, Yar (pictured here) is the daughter of Tasha. Only the two of us seemed to chuckle at the Trek reference in the naming.

On our way out to go get dinner, we took the obligatory theme park medal photo, with the assistance of one man from among a group of Italian tourists.

Dinner was, what else... Chinese. Hungry from not having a full lunch (the post-race festival only satisfied for so long) nor having nay snack in the park, we had a couple of appetizers along with our respective entrees.