I like fish, but not Long Beach

Ok, so a week ago it was Trevor and my 7th anniversary so we decided to go to the Aquarium of the Pacific! I had never been there so I was excited! Well we were still quite tired from last month (see previous post) so Friday night we were like, well should we set an alarm clock? Well, yes we "should" but we are so tired, lets just see if we wake up in time we will go, if not then it was not meant to be....

So we woke up at 9am, not too bad actually so we decided yes lets go! Now of course the down side is that it took me 2 hours to get ready (I had to wash my hair....I have a LOT of hair). So it is 11am, suddenly it almost seems silly to go, but we were all excited so we decide to go anyways. I have a bag with knitting that I like to bring in the car (why not get some crafting done if I am stuck in a car for 2 hours?). But I am rather clumsy so as we are leaving and my hands are very full, I bump into the wall, this drives the "knifty knitter" hook into my thigh. It took out a chunk of flesh 1/4 in wide by 1/4" deep! Ouch!

We also decide if we are all the way up there, we might as well stop at Sonic Burger for lunch! There is not a Sonic burger closer than 90 miles to my house, which is very sad because despite this they play the commercials on TV here in San Diego all the time and it makes me want to eat there! I really love Sonic Burger, they have so many drink options, and cool things like tater tots instead of fries! Anyways, we get to Sonic, and you drive or walk up to the menu, press a button and wait for someone to take your order. Well it was so crowded every drive-in slot was full so we went to the walk up tables. We pressed the button and after like 15 minutes no one had taken our order, so I decided to go to a different button, and then our order got placed after like 5 minutes. I guess I am saying we were there for longer than I had wanted and I was feeling like we were already late the the aquarium! It was also at this time that I discovered that during the painful hook into leg incident that I had dropped my hair clip as I was stabbed and while Trevor gathered up everything I had dropped he failed to get the hairclip, it was like 90 degrees Saturday and I have waist-length thick curly hair so I was DYING of heat without my hairclip...

So we get to Long Beach and the freeway just sorta dead-ends into downtown Long Beach, there are these stupid forks and google maps tells us something like take the left fork, right fork, right fork, left fork. Well clearly we missed a fork at some point because we ended up in the wrong part of town, we followed the signs to the Aquarium so we thought we'd be ok, but these actually led us back on to the freeway, Trevor said well I will just stay in the right lane so we can take the first exit, well I guess in Long Beach they have exits on the LEFT side! So we see a sign that says for the Aquarium you need to exit left and U-turn (wow that is stupid) so we cut across three lanes of traffic, we finally make it to the stupid Aquarium and the parking is full, so we park across the street in the "Pike" parking garage (I still am not sure what the Pike is...).

Yayy, we are finally at the Aquarium! Wow, they had the BIGGEST sting ray I have ever seen in my life! It had spots like a leopard, not I know many people say "spots like a leopard, and they just mean it had spots, but this sting ray really really looking like it had leopard skin (minus the fur).

The seahorses were so cute and tiny!

They had the most magnificent collection of jellyfish! My favorite was this one neat tank where they had res lights in the front which made the jellyfish glow red, then in the middle was white lights and in the back was dark so you had this neat mix of red, white, and shadowy jellyfish floating about.
So we finish looking at fish and we decide it is time to go, we go back to the "pike" parking garage and there is a line to leave (we are on the top 6th floor) so we are like dang this could take forever! Well we did not even realize the extent of how horrible it was.... After 20 minutes we had only moved one car length!! We saw an open parking spot so we decided to go park again and go kill time somewhere instead of sitting in line. As we were in the elevator going down the doors would open and you could see that the traffic was totally jammed on floor as well. Floor was jammed. The doors open on floor and it was completely empty, we were like, woah, where did all the traffic go???? We figured that there MUST be a traffic accident on floor 4. So we go to a Borders across the street to kill time, I bought 3 cookbooks, hehehe, opps! So we go back an hour later and the traffic is totally cleared, we see a security dude and we ask him hey was there an accident earlier, he said no it was crowded because people were leaving the aquarium, movie theater and something else all at the same time. Well that just did not make sense to us, then why was there no traffic on floors 1-3? Well as we were driving out we found out why, for floors 4-6 you have to drive through the garage to get out but at floor 4 they send you out to some funny little loop exit on the side of the garage. So everyone on floors 4-6 has to wait to get in the loopy exit as people from floors 1-3 also are cutting in front of them, what a poorly designed garage!!!

So we are finally leaving and Trevor asks what we want to do for dinner, I say lets just get the heck out of Long Beach/LA/Orange or wherever we are. Lets go home to San Diego where the roads are labeled and there are no weird left lane exits. Well then Trevor points out that it is 7pm already (I have not adjusted to daylight savings I guess) and that by the time we get home it will be too late to get dinner. So we decide to go to "Amazon" which was a Brazilian place that we had seen across the street from Sonic Burger. It was good, they had all sorts of funny meats like alligator and the waiter comes to your table with a sword of meat and spears you off a slice. We ate our meat, we went across the street and got a cherry-limeade and then went home to San Diego (which I have a new appreciation for) and fell promptly asleep.