Stewart's 2010 Baseball Trip: SeaWorld San Diego

After the conclusion of the Giants/Padres series, I had a free day in San Diego before travelling on to Atlanta, so I took the hotel's free shuttle bus to SeaWorld for the day. The shuttle goes at 9.30am and returns at 5pm. it got me there at about 9.50am, which was OK, because they don't open the gates until 10am. My ticket cost $69, but it will let me go in as many times as I like in 2010 - there wasn't any discount for just one day. Although the gates opened at 10, the attractions didn't actually open for another 5 minutes, as we had to have the national anthem played before everything could start for the day!

I decided to view all the shows in the morning, so that I could look at things in the afternoon and be ready to be collected at 5pm. The shows are timetabled so tat you can do that. All the shows last 20-25 minutes, with a 45-minute gap between them. I think that since it is now out-of-season, they don't run the shows as many times during the day - each show only ran twice a day.

The first show I went to was the Sealions Live show, which took the form of two humans, two sealions and an otter performing on what was dressed as a TV show set, re-enacting several popular TV programmes, including Sea Lion SI (CSI), Dancing with the Pinnipeds (Strictly Come Dancing), and a couple of others too. The second show was the Blue Horizons show, in the Dolphin stadium. In addition to the dolphins, it featured some vultures and some other birds (I couldn't work out why) and some other animals, a lot of men dressed as birds on trapezes and splashing. The third was the Believe show featuring Shamu the killer whale. All serving military personnel were required to stand up before this show was allowed to being so that they could be clapped, which was very odd - San Diego seems to feel a closer association to the armed forces than many other cities. The San Diego Padres' Sunday uniforms is a khaki camouflage colour, too.

There was no shade at any of the shows, and it was a hot & sunny day. I had remembered to put the sun cream on everywhere except the back of my hands, which are now very red, whilst everywhere else is not so red. I decided not to bother with the Pets show or the Sesame Street show, as I thought that even the main shows were targeted at children, so those two would be not so good. I did visit the Penguins, in a nicely-cooled environment and the Arctic adventure area, which contained polar bears and Beluge whales, and was similarly pleasantly cold. After lunch, I went around the other aquarium buildings and took lots of pictures, athough my battery ran out towards the end of the day.

I left at 4.55pm, and the hotel van was waiting in the shuttle pickup area for me, and so I was back at the hotel before 5.30pm and was able to go out to dinner in the evening and then pack for the early start the next day - flight leaves at 6.40am, so I've got the taxi booked to take me to the airport at 5.25am (it's less than 10 minutes away - I can see the runway from my room! - and I've already checked in, just need to drop the bag off and go through security)