Sea World

My friends Bev and family are visiting me for a few days. They are taking a long vacation around the country and finished up a few days in Sanibel, FL, and drove up yesterday.

We lounged around the pool, got some Cuban food, and took it easy watching TV. Today we all went to SeaWorld, where we watched all the shows.

• Sea Lion and Sea Otter Show - this show is comedy based, with some jokes, puns, and a plot about getting shipwrecked and finding buried treasure. The show makes fun of itself and is really about the sea otters, sea lion, and walruses doing tricks. There is an evening version where this show makes fun of the other shows, and someday I'll come back to watch it. This show is pretty good.
  
  
• Dolphin Show - this show features a large cast of people and dolphins, doing some pretty cool acrobatics. The dolphins do jumps and flips, pushing people along with their snout, dragging somebody hanging onto their fin, or letting somebody ride them like a surfboard. As a really slow swimmer I wish I could feel what it is like getting pushed through the water by a dolphin. :) The show also has acrobatics, diving, and even parrots released over the audience. This show is very good and recommended.
  
  
• Shamu Show - this is the big show in the park, and it is some mishmash of saluting the military combined with inspirational speeches about following dreams. The main gag seems to be "haha you got splashed by the orcas" since they make it a big point to douse the front few rows. The cast rides the orcas a few times but I thought what they did in the dolphin show was more impressive. The show is OK and soemthing to see if you don't miss the other ones.
  
  
• Nautilus Show - this one is indoors and has no animals. But it was fantastic, sort of a mini Cirque du Soliel show: people in penguin costumes doing trampoline tricks, acrobats entwined in silk unrolling above the stage, contortionists, people in silk tube costumes doing funny movements. I really like this show as well. It really was like a mini Cirque show minus all the weird avant-garde comedy/mime/clown stuff that Cirque slips in between the acrobatics. Recommended.
  

Afterwards we were getting tired walking around, so we went to the kid area which I didn't even know was there. Sea World has the hugest jungle gym and netted tube crawling park I've ever seen. I rode the kiddie roller coaster with Ben, Dylan, and Sam and I was impressed as far as kiddie coasters go. I've been on ones that are really tame with barely any vertical drop, but this one had a decent first drop and two or three twists in the 30 seconds the ride lasted.

Bascially if you are visiting Sea World I would recommend seeing the Dolphins and Nautilus shows. Check out the Lion and Otter show too, and if you finished all that then maybe see Shamu.