Since we were so near Corpus Christi (for Texas anyway) and since the kids, especially Wesley, love aquariums, we decided to stop at the Texas State Aquarium on our way back to Austin from Port Aransas. From the website, we got the impression that the aquarium was a bit larger and dare I say nicer than it actually was, but it was plenty big enough for us to fill a few hours before getting back in the car. I wouldn’t make a special trip from Austin just to go to the aquarium, but it was worth stopping by since we were in the area.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Before we got to the aquarium, we took a small ferry across the entry to Corpus Christi Bay. The ferries held about 20 cars each and made the crossing in about 3 minutes. During the crossing we saw some more Dolphins.  As you can see from this image from Google Maps, the ferries are pretty maneuverable (compared to the much larger Washington State ferries) and they’ll just go around obstacles.

In our case the ferry waited a bit and then zipped around a large oil tanker, the Eagle Augusta. It took us about an hour to get the aquarium by car. An hour after we got there we saw it go by us while we were watching the dolphin show at the aquarium.

The aquarium has three dolphins and they put on a pretty good show for about 15 minutes.  Jillian was more interested in climbing up and down the stairs, but Wesley got into it.

During and after lunch Wesley really got into the touch tank. They had a few kinds of ray, which by getting his sleeves really wet, Wesley could get a quick touch.  Too bad the water stank so much.

While there were a few nice exhibits (a couple were closed for repairs), the best part really is the dolphins. We spent a lot of time (more than the kids cared for) watching them under water. We thought they were swimming back and forth looking at us. Turns out the their side of the glass is mirrored. Probably a lesson in that for us somewhere.  On the upside, the aquarium wasn’t busy so we had the whole room to ourselves.

Jillian was still in the midst of being sick and was pretty warn out. Even though we were only at the aquarium a few hours she had had enough. J broke down and we decided it was time to go.

We had another four or so more hours to go in the car. We stopped for dinner at a kind of creepy Mexican restaurant (the food was okay, but not great) and had a very long drive home. It was a very long drive home. A very, very long drive home. But we made it and we’ll never go back, so it is all okay.