Georgia Aquarium

The final Christmas adventure with my family was a trip to the Georgia Aquarium.  It was huge and amazing!  We wish we could have had more time to explore, but we made the best with the time we had.  

The girls loved the tunnels under the penguin habitat that had pop-up windows in the middle of the habitat:

Elsa wished she could have a real mermaid fin (of course) for the coral reef:

The most impressive visit was the extra large, 6.3 million gallon, Ocean Voyager tank.  Here we all are in the tunnel (Joel, Beatrice, Naomi, Elsa, and my father):

and Nora and my mother, with one of the four whale sharks overhead (the largest known fish, averaging around 25 feet long):

The girls really liked the bubble windows that curved into the tank.

"Oh no, Nora fell in!  Look out for that giant grouper!"

I thought she might actually get spooked by the huge fish that had swum up behind her, but she didn't seem to mind at all, and just said "Hi fishy!"

There was also one super large gallery viewing window of the entire tank.  That's Elsa's arm raised up at the bottom:

We hung around for the feeding time for the whale sharks - watching the tank was rather mesmerizing after a while.

Whale sharks eat tiny zooplankton and tiny fish.  They scoop them up with their large mouths and filter the food through a very small throat opening, so it looked like they became vacuum cleaners sucking in the water when the food was distributed.

It was a pretty amazing way to end the year.