big big fish

We (Tripp and I) surprised Lee with a last minute mini vacation to Atlanta on Saturday. He has a big birthday tomorrow, and we thought it was the perfect occassion to get away. Thursday afternoon I told Tripp we were going to take Daddy to see the big fish. Well as soon as Lee gets home about 45 minutes later, Tripp starts saying big fish daddy, big fish. Well Lee wasn't catching what he was saying. Eventually he figured it out. With a sweet friend's connection, we got tickets to the Georgia Aquarium and I got a nice hotel room cheap via priceline.com. So Saturday morning we headed east. We checked into our room at the Renaissance Atlanta Downtown and then made our way to the Marta station. Tripp loved riding the "choo-choo." Once we got over to the aquarium, I was a little worried it would take us a while to get in, the place was packed. Apparently it's like that every weekend. But we went straight through the will call line and made our way in pretty quickly.

Waiting paitently to go inside...

It was hard to get him to look at the camera, all he wanted to look at were the fish. We even tried to pick him up away from the glass. I tried hard to get a smile, but no such luck...

Coming down the giant mouth slide in the children's area.

The aquarium is really neat and huge! It's divided up into different areas and we made our way through them all. Tripp would run straight up to the windows, and point out the big fish. Even though it was crowded, we still got to see everything. I think we all loved the Ocean Voyager area the best. You first walk through a tunnel with the fish/sharks swimming all around you, and then you end up in front of a gigantic viewing window. They have whale sharks there, and they are massive. After our visit, we made our way to dinner. After a long day, we just stopped at the Varsity by the hotel. Lee had never been, and we didn't have to worry about bringing a toddler there so it worked. We enjoyed some hot dogs and ice cream.

We had a great short visit. The Aquarium was a lot of fun and we enjoyed it very much. Hopefully next time we visit Atlanta, we can do more. I also highly suggest priceline.com. Definitely the way to go getting a cheap nice hotel room. We'll try it again soon!