The good and bad about our trip to Georgia Aquarium!
Out trip this past Valentines Day to Georgia Aquarium was a fantastic adventure. We are a military family stationed at Fort Gordon, right in Augusta Georgia about 3 hours from the Georgia Aquarium. We have a not so little homeschooling family of 6 (and counting) and love field trips. Our 9 year old son had been mentioning how we have not since moving here had near enough field trips. On thinking about it, of course he was right! So I made last minute plans thinking Valentines Day all together as a family learning at Georgia Aquarium would be very romantic to geeks like husband and I. That being said, we just went for it! We didn’t get advanced or discounted tickets. I can’t even tell you how that day it would have worked out had we managed it!
Don’t go to Georgia Aquarium on Valentine’s Day!
Traffic that day was insanity to us, specially going into the Aquarium parking garage. The great news is that this Aquarium has it’s own paid parking garage. The bad was that they closed it for a while right after we got in. What luck that was! We went up to floor 6 where we finally managed to get a parking spot. We thought that might be the worst of it, we were wrong.
The line to get in was over 2 hours long and not at all organized. By the time we got up to an employee we had waited over an hour and she said the rest of the line past her was for those who already had tickets for entering that hour. You had to have known to get tickets at the ticket machines. No one knew this except for those who had already gotten that far. My husband ran to get them for us. We had tickets and had waiting in line but the employee told everyone with the next hours tickets to stand aside. She didn’t make another line. So those of us in front of us and us sat down right there on the bench. Only those who came after us made a line in front of us. I don’t think they knew we were in line before them. Thus when they finally started letting those with our hour tickets into the next part of the line, we got a few looks. At that point though, I didn’t much care. We were managing 4 children and so far, none were upset!
The whole line situation and ticketing could have been cleared up! If we had gotten tickets online I have no idea how that would have worked as I believe you have to change the print out into real tickets and it was all that same line….. it was insanity.
I had that morning asked on Georgia Aquarium’s facebook page if they were busy that day, they never replied. Had I know, we would have gone another day! I recommend you go another day!
For tickets we paid over $200 for tickets to get us in.
Georgia Aquarium is Amazing!
As we had gone here before we went right to the largest tank! We took the tunnel through to see the whale sharks and all their friends. It is instant WOW factor for the kids. After all the anxiety of the line we settled down in the seating area for that exhibit and soaked it in.
Can you tell how excited our little ones are? I think our StormBaby (on the right) was still a bit shell shocked from the line! Our SmilieBaby (on the left) was buzzing with excitement over all the fish and sharks.
Fibromyalgia and Pregnancy Accessible!
I wanted to note that while it was extremely busy and crowded there I did manage to find places to sit down frequently and the bathroom lines were not too long! With Fibro, pain is an issue as is fatigue and so on field trips sitting often can help with managing the day. With pregnancy, this holds true as well, but the bathroom is specially important!
Unlike some other Aquariums it can sometimes be hard to see size, just how massive the fish are but here you can get right up to the glass and so often the fish and sharks do too! My camera focus wasn’t able to also capture the stingray she was pointing to in the same shot. She was very excited.
Like most homeschoolers we prepped for this field trip. As it was last minute though, it wasn’t a lot of prep. I would suggest knowing what animals your children specially want to see and having them keep an eye for those. The day was overwhelming for our youngest and reminding her of the animals she specially was looking forward to helped her keep going and regain focus!
TIP: Dress your children brightly! Most of the Aquarium is rather dark and it can be hard to keep track of kids when things are so busy and dark!
One of the down sides to going on a busy holiday was that the kids didn’t really get to see the Dolphin and the Dolphin Show line was over an hour long. We will be trying to learn when a quiet day might be to go back and see the Dolphins as they were on the important lists of two of our children.
One of the nice things that was not busy that day was face painting! They were not costly and the kids loved them!
The cafeteria food was fantastic, we all got what we wanted and spent about $80 on Dinner there. The kids all loved this field trip in the end. Even with how busy it was!
