Day 19: Discovery Cove and Wonderworks

We woke up early today for Discovery Cove as we had to meet our American Sign Language interpreter named Mike to get acquainted before our slot with dolphins. We arrived at Discovery Cove and got checked in. The security was unusually heavy, they checked our issued ID cards, boarding pass and scanned our fingerprints before allowing us in.

We all settled down for a free buffet breakfast as a part of our package which also an excellent chance to familiarise ourselves with Mike's ASL and for Mike to get familiar with our BSL! To be fair to Mike, he adapted excellently to our language differences which were aided by our small knowledge of ASL gained through Sara's grandparents who learnt the language when they were living in Canada with Peter (Sara's dad) when he was little. We settled down to a happy medium with a mixture of ASL and BSL.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoyed the breakfast due to an unhappy stomach due to excessive consumption of fizzy drinks and ribs yesterday as well tiny butterflies about the day ahead. We arrived at our appointment for the dolphin swim. After the usual health and safety lecture, we was split up in groups and since our family was large we had our own group. It was very enjoyable as we swam with the dolphin who was called Axl after Axl Rose the musician. We took turns to hold on Axl's fin and flipper as he dragged us through the water and we also had kisses and cuddles. Axl also greeted us with some tricks and we had a Q & A session afterwards. Apparently dolphins went bat-crazy for jellos which were their treat!

We then picked up our snorkelling gear for the rest of the day, we decided to go to lazy river so we can get used to snorkelling. It was an easy process though Julie did panic at the start and started to pull Sara's legs which then made Sara scrap her knee on a random coral! It was an enjoyable circuit with few artefacts such as sunken cannons for us to explore (We did not get kitted out with full snorkelling gear- just flippers and snorkelling mask) We also swam through an aviary with birds flying over us though I did wondered where did they went to toilets!

We decided to go for a buffet lunch and by then my stomach was ok and I had a light lunch as I learnt the lesson hard way yesterday! We also met a deaf Slovakian couple, it made Mike's day as he said he enjoyed learning two new languages in one day and it was fortunate for Slovakian couple as Mike then offered to interpret their afternoon session with dolphins. We then went in a man made coral which were filled with dazzling array of fishes including stingrays. Mike joined us later on and we all happily swam and explored. It was safe to swim with stingrays as their stingers were neutralised and there was even a shark tank where we could swim to and come face to face to sharks on the other side of the tank!

I did not panicked as Sara has warned me already about this as she found out the hard way when she went to Discovery Cove when she was 10 and came face to face to a shark where she screamed loudly and attracted everyone's attention as she was unaware of the tank! We all then relaxed for a bit before heading to Wonderworks.

Wonderworks is a bizarre house turned upside down filled with unusual exhbits inside such as a custom earthquake room where we felt a 5.9 richter scale earthquake, custom made roller coaster where we could design all of loops beforehand before trying it out via a virtual simulator, bed of nails where we can attempt to lie on it and a mind game where we had to use our mind to push a ball over the line. It was an excellent value for the money and kept us all amused for hours especially when I got all tangled up on an high trail course to everyone's amusement! We took ages in there that we forgot all about having dinner and we found a pizza buffet for six dollars that we managed to snuck in just before it closed.