One of the things that we were looking forward to doing most was taking Lily and Olivia to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Lily loves the aquarium in Boise and that’s super dinky especially compared to Monterey so we knew it’d be a big hit.

It’s about a 3 hour drive to Monterey from my Dad’s house so we loaded the girls up with tablets and hit the road earlyish.

This is what we saw for hours. I don’t know how many times the girls asked that infamous questions; “Are we there yet?”

In the middle of nowhere, about half way between Madera and Monterey is Casa de Fruta.

We checked out all the fun stuff that Casa de Fruta has to offer for a while to give the girls a chance to stretch their legs.

We rode the carousal and had a blast. The girls really wanted to ride their little train and we made the mistake of saying that we’d ride it on the way back because we were out of time. As you can imagine they were very upset when we got back to Casa de Fruta less than 5 minutes after they closed the train.

This was our first look at the ocean. We are on the top of the parking garage that we finally found to park at.

We had some lunch and then FINALLY headed to the aquarium.

I tried to plan this trip to the aquarium so that we’d be there on a day when they had no special events scheduled. I failed, big time. It was World Ocean Day and the place was packed.

Even packed we tried to have as much fun as possible.

Olivia succeed a little more than Lily at first.

Lily finally got into it. She still wasn’t thrilled about the crowd, but was so caught up in all the fish and fish stuff that she enjoyed herself.

I believe Lily’s trying to hug the lobster.

I managed to find a way to do crafts. I was so happy and so was Lil.

I became somewhat obsessed with the jelly fish.

Princess Olivia with the Jellies.

Hey a sea turtle.

And more jellies.

Some kind of upside down jelly.

Lily and Olivia in a jelly fish symmetry display.

Insy winsy jellies.

Then we found the sea horse room. These guys are pretty cool.

These are some kind of funky sea horse, I wish I could remember their name.

I became almost as obsessed with this guy as with the jellies. He’s a leafy sea dragon if memory serves.

We finally found the touch pools after looking for them all day, but they were so crowded that even Olivia didn’t want to play with the fish anymore. That was fine with us because we were all pooped.

I had really wanted to go down and play on the beach a little before we headed home, but it was very chilly and super windy so that was out and we headed home. We did stop at Casa de Fruta and like I said we got there right after the train closed. We grabbed sandwiches from the deli and headed home. Both girls fell asleep before we got home, which was really very late, but normally Lily doesn’t sleep in the car these days.