Monterey Bay Aquarium

7. Go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium

Since Monterey is only a two hour drive from San Francisco, we decided to take a trip down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Saturday. I had been to the aquarium once when I was much younger and E had never been and we were both really looking forward to the visit. We headed down nice and early and arrived within an hour of the aquarium opening for the day to try to avoid the weekend crowd (which proved to be a wise decision as it started getting really crowded around noon). We arrived just in time for the penguin feedings. I spent a good 15-20 minutes trying to get a decent picture but they just wouldn't cooperate so my picture with poor lighting will have to do.

The Downtown Aquarium in Denver is a really nice place with a lot of great exhibits, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium just blows it away. The first thing you see when you enter the building is a huge tank containing a kelp forest with different fish and sharks found off the California coast. This exhibit alone sets the bar pretty high as far as expectations for the rest of the aquarium go. Luckily, the rest of the exhibits did not disappoint! The picture above shows one exhibit that I could easily spend an entire day staring at. This huge tank was in a big dark room with gallery seating in an upper level. There is one giant sea turtle, two hammerhead sharks, a few other sharks, some huge tuna, and a school of smaller fish in the tank. The dark room definitely gives the room a quiet, tranquil mood, but what really stood out to me is how large the tank is with such a small amount of sea creatures. This exhibit helps to create an atmosphere similar to what you would find in the open ocean.

The aquarium has a fantastic jellyfish exhibit with so many different species of jellyfish. These tanks are well lit in a dark room so they really just seem to glow and really stand out. The jellyfish are really neat creatures that are fascinating to watch because they seem to fold into themselves in order to move. I really enjoyed walking around this exhibit and got some really fun pictures too!

E and I really had a great time walking around the Monterey Bay Aquarium and actually ended up spending about 3 hours wondering around and checking out all the different animals, fish, plants, etc. Afterward, we enjoyed a nice lunch at Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory and then took the scenic drive up Highway 1 back up to San Francisco. Overall, our entire weekend was very successful and we crammed as much as we possibly could into the short amount of time that we had.