SUZ - DON'T READ THIS POST!!!

When the Salt Lake Valley got a new aquarium earlier this year, lots of people were clamoring to see it, but Ben and I were not on the list.  We've been to two of the aquariums recognized as the best in the country (Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta and Florida Aquarium in Tampa) and we figured this one wouldn't be quite as good.  But when a friend gave us tickets to this new aquarium, we started talking about a good time to go and take the kids to see what the aquarium had to offer.

We thought Saturday would be a good day, but the boys were sick in the morning, so we weren't sure it was going to work out.  We needed to go to Salt Lake to pick my Mom up from the airport (yeah!) later in the afternoon, and when the kids seemed to be better after Luke's nap, we decided to make the aquarium happen.  I thought I might just walk around with the family for a bit, then go pick Mom up and come back to pick everyone up afterwards, but the aquarium was small enough that we felt like we could see pretty much everything before it was time to get Grammy.  We managed to do it - and we all had a really good time.

The shark tunnel was the first stop.  I never saw a list of the number of species in the tank, but there were at least 4 different kinds, and a lot of them.  It was fun to watch them and we got a kick out of the shark that was napping on top of the tunnel for most of the time we were there.

Penguins!  Eliza and I laughed at how the penguins swam so fast under water
and looked like they were playing tag.

That big fish is the Arapaima, which is an air-breathing fish
that lives in the Amazon and can grow to be over 8 feet
long and weigh over 330 pounds.  Whoa.

Pat yourself on the back if you can find the basilisk lizard.

Electric eel.

14-foot anaconda in front of the kids, piranha at the bottom of the picture.

The Amazon exhibit also had a rope bridge to walk across.
Jack was really eager to do this, but a bit scared when the time came.
He walked over like a champ, though!

Otters!  These were in the Utah exhibit.  I had no idea that otters are
indigenous to Utah.  Now I kind of want to go find one in the wild.
Apparently they were re-introduced to the Provo River a few years ago...

And with that, our trip to the aquarium was over.  We had to scurry to pick up this lovely lady so that she could make her appointment with our in-house makeup artist.