10-26 Valencia and the Aquarium at the City of Arts and Science

 Once again we made the 2 hour trek to Valencia.  Jojo had alluded to the fact that she had yet to visit the aquarium as it was too expensive.  Once Lia and Natasha heard that the trip would not only include the aquarium, but their cousin Jojo, they were all in.  

All worked as planned, we picked up Jojo close to her apartment and drove the few more minutes to the City of Arts and Sciences.  We let the girls pick the exhibits to see and ended up doing a lot of walking!

Walking from the underground parking to the aquarium.

Inside - I think this was a Amphibian exhibit.

Grandpa showing he can be as dexterous as a ten year old!

Pelicans

This looks like sharks - but I lost track of all the areas we saw.

The penguins are always favorites.

Not sure what they were looking at - but Grandpa and I needed a rest - so we all sat there for a while.

We had not planned on it - but we timed our visit to the dolphins perfectly to watch the show.

the guy in the middle was riding two dolphins.

The show was all in Spanish of-course.  I know the speaker was telling people where to look.  Not understanding the language, I was lucky to catch as many dolphins in action as I did.

They were a long ways away - so these are heavily cropped.

Next - tortoises.

Jojo and Natasha are in the middle of the crowd.  If you look in the upper right you can see an arm and orange shirt - took me a while - but that is a reflection of Natasha!

Jellyfish exhibit - also shown all over the crowd of people.

Walking back to the main building and the exit.  Love the reflections on the building's windows.

I had brought snacks - but not enough - everyone except Jojo is hungry.  All the cafe's in the complex are full and expensive.  We opted to walk a little ways out of the complex to a mall that had mostly eateries.  Only to find that they too were crowded and had long lines.

We finally found something called Frutolandia that had ice cream.  Lia and Natasha were happy with their ice cream.  They had a lot of fruit smoothies and other fruit kind of things.  But as we sat there, Michael looked at the menu and found some real food.  So he and I ordered pitas with meat and vegetables.  We didn't have enough time to do anything else and all wanted to spend more time together instead of taking Jojo home and the rest of us heading home.  So it all worked out.  Here the girls are playing a game on someone's phone.  Lia also had a really small deck of cards in her purse - which occupied them while we ate our sandwiches.  I hope the day will be a happy memory for the cousins.