Aquarium

The day after my mom left, Dan and I took Hannah to the aquarium. It's not the best aquarium ever, but they have done a lot of work on it in the last few years, and it's a lot better than it used to be. We were there at the perfect time. There were a few other families there, but we hardly saw them at all, and there were a couple of school groups too, but we managed to avoid them almost the whole time. Most of the time it seemed like we had the place to ourselves. Hannah loved it, which was nice since the last time I took her to an aquarium she cried the entire time.

You can't tell, but there are sea lions in that tank.

Sea turtles are my favorite!!!

teenaged mutant ninja sea turtles! There were 4 of these guys, and that's seriously all I could think about.

We decided to feed her to the sharks

 Hannah loved the sting ray tank, even though she never got close enough to actually touch one. She was just stoked to finally be allowed to splash in the water.

Her hair looks so red in this picture!

This was one of her favorite parts. We were trying to get her to touch one of the horseshoe crabs, but she went for the spider crab instead, which of course gave me the heebie jeebies, but she loved it. 

The best part about the Virginia Beach aquarium is that it's actually split in two parts, with a gorgeous nature trail connecting them. It is on an inlet of the beach, so you are walking by the water and walking in the woods at the same time. That morning also had probably the best weather of our trip, which was awesome. The fall colors were so pretty!

Otters!! This is one of my favorite animals, but Hannah wouldn't even look at them. Go figure.

We discovered that there's a kids area now. It was pretty nice, but Hannah was pretty tired by this point and just kept stealing this kid's toys.

All in all, it was a great morning. Now we need to take her back to the one here...

Mount Trashmore

There is a great park in Virginia Beach which was built on top of a landfill. It sounds really weird, I know, but once you think about it, it's quite genius. What a great way to recycle and turn something ugly into something beautiful. There is the "mountain" part, which you can walk up, down, and around, and where many people go to fly kites and run stairs, but there is also a beautiful park for kids to play on. It's always been pretty nice, but since I moved away, they tore everything down and started over, including the rest rooms which are now pretty nice. The new playground is super safe and friendly to kids of any age. The walkways are big enough for 4-5 kids to walk side by side, there are hardly any stairs, and the stuff they used for the ground is cushy and soft. I was super impressed. We spent a couple hours here, way more than we normally would have, because we had to check out of our hotel at 10 am, and our flight didn't leave till almost 6pm, so we had a LOT of time to kill. For the most part Hannah really enjoyed it, especially when she got licked by a dog! I wish I had more pictures of her face, but like I've said, it was really cold and windy, even away from the ocean front.

Hannah is always trying to climb up slides, so when she saw this- a slide designed to be climbed!- she had a total hay day. She was so proud of herself.

View of the park from the top of the hill

The other side of the "mount"