Agua

Today was water day at Sea World for Colton and I. They have a whole quarter of the park that is alot like White Water, and Colton and I had made plans to spend the day in this part of the park.
Of course, since they're on the way, and since it's now tradition, we had to stop at the dolphins first and get a few pets in. The girl next to Colton really had one enchanted, so Colton got alot of touching in today. Still way too cool!
Then off to the Lost Lagoon. We started off buying a waterproof camera that we could take with us all day. We went in their version of the lazy river and floated around at least 5 times. Colton wore his new goggles (his 4th pair this summer) and had a ball swimming/floating face down through the whole ride. Their lazy river has fountains that spray you and even some rapids - that was interesting. But we really enjoyed playing in there. Then we went off to ride a slide. Now, for anyone that may know about my last slide-riding adventure, you'll understand why Colton rode down and I waited at the bottom with the camera! He said it was "freaky" because it was covered all the way down and you couldn't see ANYTHING! Then off to the wave pool. I have horrible memories of nearly drowning when I was pre-teenish at White Water's wave pool, so I was RIGHT beside Colton the whole time. Of course, he's an expert at the waves because he's spent so much time with the REAL ones, but I got beat up trying to stay beside him in case he started to drown in the 3 ft of water. Hey, those waves are BIG!
During the past two Shamu shows that we've seen, they've chosen a child at random from one of the gates before the show opens and this kid gets to go up on stage and share their "dream" and Shamu comes right up to them on the stage. Well, yesterday we had to hang back after the show so he could ask one of the trainers how the kids got picked. So today Colton wanted to make sure that we were out in front of the gates in plenty of time to possibly get picked out of hundreds of other kids. So we left the Lost Lagoon and headed ALL the way over to the other side of the park to the Shamu show. And since we have the waterproof camera, we might as well sit on the front row again. What the heck, we're already in our swimsuits! So we did. And like last time I only HOPE the pictures are half as good as the views we had.
We also caught the end of the Viva show again (with the dolphins and beluga whales) and the end of the "critter" show with all kinds of critters. It was cute.
Then back to the Lagoon for a little more time swimming. Mind you, I'm already burnt to a crisp, but hey, I tan out pretty well.
Once we decided to leave, we went ahead and made all of our souvenir purchases (now we're broke!) and headed out. We had been so busy today we hadn't eaten lunch, so we stopped for Chinese food on the way back. We made a quick trip downtown (nightmare)(thank God for Garmin!) to pick up Ed and Earlene who spent the day on the riverwalk, and headed back to camp.
Earlene had a few things she needed to pick up from Wal Mart, so we headed to the nearest (thank God for Garmin!). I asked the photo lab person what time they stopped taking things for one hour developing. He/she (I couldn't tell) said 7:45. It was 7:50. Shoot! So I left the camera there to pick up at 10 am tomorrow and got those pictures on disk so I can share them right away. I did get to add pictures from yesterday this evening, so be sure to check those out. I have NONE to add from today because my camera decided not to work for some reason. Right when Colton got the chance to take a picture with the Shamu character. Boo. But leave it to them, they were right there to take one for us (with both of us in it). It was expensive knowing that I could have done just as good, but SO beautiful, and such a great memory picture. I'll have to wait a few days to get to a scanner to load that one!
About the title: I decided today that I've never been in a more culturally diverse place than in the last few days. Our little campground here has had a tourist company come in with different groups each night with all of these different people (most of them Joe's age or so) from everywhere around the world! First night was the French people. Yesterday alot of Sweedish and German. Today seems to be alot from South Africa. Interesting listening to them while you're all crammed in the bathrooms together waiting. And then there was Sea World. SO many cultures. So many languages. And the people working at Sea World (and at the Space Center too) - lots of different accents and names on the name tags that you could never say right if you tried. Was funny today... there were about 4 different people working at this one stand and these were really different names that I had never heard of. Then there was the obvious manager of the stand off to the side. Obviously American. Name tag: Big Mike. It fit. LOL