Flashback Friday: San Diego April 2008

We stayed at the Bahia Resort in San Diego. This particular evening we were waiting to go on the Bahia Belle.



Hotel fun. Here the kids were feeding the ducks some bits of bread outside of our room. It was kind of a cozy dive. Ah, memories.



Our hotel was right on the beach. The kids enjoyed hanging out at the beach every evening. It was the first time they played on an ocean beach.






Heading home. Do you think we soaked up some sun? Poor little pink kids.

Flashback Friday: San Diego/Legoland April 2008

Welcome to the third installment of our April 2008 San Diego trip: Legoland edition. We got a little "animaled" out, so I talked Nate into springing for some Legoland tickets for us. It was a welcome break. We had a riot! After one day there we were so excited that we could bounce back another day for free! Bonus! So, we spent two days of our trip here.

Legoland had a lot of rides that were perfect for our young kids at the time.



Legoland was so full of water features. It was perfect for those blazing hot Southern California days.


The water playground had a really cool feature that the kids (and Nate) really loved. Buckets at the top slowly filled with water and when they were all full they would tip and dump 500 gallons of water on everyone! It was amazing.










We have a lot of great memories from hanging out at Legoland.

Flashback Friday: San Diego Zoo April 2006

Boy humor....I just don't get it. Ethan thought it was hilarious getting his photo taken by the bum of this Gorilla statue. Whatever floats your boat buddy.



We were all super excited when Ethan was picked out of the audience to go on stage at the Sea Lion show to help out. I could tell he was a little nervous, but he did great. Don't worry Ethan, I doubt this is your only 15 minutes of fame.

He got a BIG smooch from the Sea Lion.

They invited Ethan to feed the Sea Lion some dead fish. If you recall from the post about Sea World, touching dead fish wasn't really Ethan's thing. I wasn't sure what he was gonna do. He's thinking about it.... Pressures on.....everyone's watching. Gotta be cool. What's he gonna do?

It happened so fast I actually missed it. Stupid camera. Gotta love how he is
wiping his fish smelling hand on his shirt. Nice. I remember he complained about the smell of his hand pretty much the rest of the day. I still think he thought it was worth it.

Flashback Friday: San Diego/Sea World April 2008

There are a few reasons why I am going to start featuring a Flashback Friday post on our family blog. 1) Our blog only dates back to May 2009, and we have been around a lot longer than that. 2) I am hardly ever scrapbooking these days. 3) I am already planning on printing my blog into a nice hardbound book every year. 4) I think it will be fun to revisit some past memories that we have shared together. So to kick off this feature, for the month of April we will be revisiting our family trip to San Diego in April 2008. At first I was planning on doing this in one post and then I remembered the sheer number of photos that we took on that trip and figured it was better to break it up over 4 weeks instead. Don't worry, you will thank me later.
We were in San Diego for about 5 days, we hit Sea World over two different days.
(Nate 32, Ronda 29, Ethan 8, Ally 6, Ryland 4)

The very first thing we did when we got to Sea World was ride Journey to Atlantis.

Ally and Ethan were sure that they were ready for the big drop. I am not so sure they were. It took about a half an hour to calm Ally down and move on with our lives. She has declared she will never ride that ride again. Time will tell.

Where were Ryland and Daddy? They opted to hang out by an aquarium that held an endangered species of Dolphin. We can't remember their name but we do remember that they swim upside down.

This photo was taken outside of the Sea Otter exhibit. Boy did they stink.

Ryland and Ally opted to feed the Sea Otters some small dead fish. Ewww, I know. Ethan didn't want anything to do with that. Smart kid if you ask me.


This was at the Tide Pools where we got a chance to hold star fish.


This was while we were waiting to watch the Dolphin Discovery show. That was so fun to watch, even if it was hotter than Hades, so much for going in the spring time for cooler weather.

We were in San Diego for about 5 days so we actually spent 2 different days at Sea World. On our last day there we were saddened to hear that one of the Dolphins there had been in a training accident off site and had died. The kids were heartbroken. We decided to get Evelyn (who was home in Utah with Grandma and Grandpa Hale) a stuffed dolphin to remember her by. We named it Sharky after the Dolphin who had passed away. As you can see that stuffed animal is still loved, this photo was taken just this week.
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We really enjoyed watching the Shamu Believe show as well. It is amazing how big and beautiful the Orca whales are.

It was so hot that we opted to sit in the splash zone. Ryland and I were the lucky recipients of the majority of the water. We were a lot wetter than we looked. It felt great!