Our Family: San Francisco

This weekend we got tickets to take the kids to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. We left early Saturday morning and headed down. The kids thought it would be a "boring" museum trip. Needless to say I am thrilled their thoughts had changed by the end.

They had a planetarium inside the museum that was all digital and we sat in a amphitheatre and had Jody Foster narrate the story of the planets. It was really amazing. It was so realistic that you were flying through space that they had a warning saying if you felt like you were going to fall to just close your eyes....LOL

The floor was all made of water, with sharks and manta rays swimming around. There was little portholes that the kids could stand on and watch the sharks swim under their feet.

Inside here we got to go inside the bubble dome that was underneath the pools on the first floor. The entire basement was the Steinhous Aquarium. It had tons of really neat fish and animals. At the time they had a Phillipino tidepool exhibit so Milton was thrilled. We saw everything from electric eels, Sea Bass, snapping turtles, jellyfish and even a exhibit of Nautilus's.

They had baby eels that would pop up out of the sand every few minutes.

Here is Trinity, Aidin and Karan reaching into the tidal pools. You could touch starfish, urchins and various other tidal creatures. I love Trinity's face in this picture....LOL the starfish were about the size of the kids heads some were moving a little bit around the pool.

There was a tunnel you could walk through that was the underside of the Amazon rainforest room. They had fish swimming around the size of Raman (well almost). Here is an Alligator Gar and it was massive.

Orca skull

Here is an alligator and a crocodile skull so you could see the differences between them. They had a live albino alligator and it was so neat to see it swimming around with the fish.

Whale vertebrae

Here is a fossil of a sea scorpion.

The girls got to work on the Academy's computer's and pretend they were scientists......apparently sassy scientists..

Whale skeleton

Here we are now on the second floor inside the Rainforest exhibit. It's actually three stories tall and an actual replica of the rain forest. We had to go into a room to close us off and then they would let us in the room to make sure none of the animals got out. Since they have so many animals running around free they had to make sure we got used to the temperature and that we had no hitchhikers on the way out.....

Here is a shot of the third floor looking down onto the rainforest floor. This pool was the top of the tunnel that we walked through in the aquarium.

This was the mechanical snake from the movie Anaconda. It was really interesting to see how much work was involved in making that thing.

After we were done at the museum we headed over to Pier 39 to show the kids the sealions and to see the ocean.

Aidin thought it was hilarious to bark like the sealions and thought that they were barking just because he was.

We got to see Alcatraz and here is the kids figuring out how to work the telescopes.

Raman, Sunny and Skid say it's "uncool" to smile in pictures. Yeah me, so now I have tons of pictures where the kids look like they are having a great time!

Deanna and Skid

Alcatraz

Pier 39 carousel

We got to watch a "Captain Jack Sparrow Show" on the Pier. He would juggle swords while balancing plates on his mouth. Who knew Captain Jack was so talented.