the terrors of the timid traveller

It is not in our budget to fly anywhere for vacation. I had spotted an ad for Walking with Dinosaurs showing in Atlantic City a month or two ago. Since I've driven there before, I was willing to give it a try, and since we hadn't had any real vacation this summer, I decided to book a hotel and make a long weekend out of it.

Somehow, I planned this trip without it sinking trough my thick skull that it was LABOR DAY WEEKEND.

I love my GPS, but for whatever reason it really takes me on an oddssey when we go to South Jersey, I was all over the place before we even got to the AC Expressway. Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! When you drive to AC on the E-way, the first thing you come to is Trump Plaza, our destination.

I love the ocean, so I'm a sucker for waterfront, or at least water-view rooms, we were waterfront on the eleventh floor of the tower in the center. The room was OK, the view was kinda pretty, but the dead palm trees at the bottom of the picture surround a "beach bar." They had a cover band in the early evening, and disco music until 2:00 AM. I was so upset. It was so loud, I was waiting for homeland security to bust the door down and start waterboarding us.

The dinosaur show was at Boardwalk Hall, which turned out to be directly next door to the hotel, I love it when I go someplace and I can just park the car and forget about it. Mayra loved the dinosaur show, we had planned on returning to the hotel to get our swimsuits afterward, and she couldn't stop talking all the way to the room about all of her favorite parts of the show.

Somehow, I didn't get both pieces of my swimsuit in the suitcase, so my beach ensemble consisted of a white tee shirt, and aqua colored crop pants. This actually suited me fine, since I do not even like to be seen in a bathing suit or shorts, and it was better for my easily burnable pale white skin. Mayra spent some time collecting shells, then spent a couple of hours or so playing in the water. The water was suprisingly clean and shallow enough for a small child to play safely.

Sunday, I was hoping to check out the Atlantic City Aquarium, and head home early to check on the menagerie. We got to the Aquarium before they were even open. It was small compared to The National Aquarium, or Adventure Aquarium, but it is very family freindly, and the kids liked it. They had a diving show, where a diver got into a tank and fed fish and stingrays by hand, plus she had equipment to talk to us amd answer questions. They have shark and ray feeding also, but I misunderstood the instructions and didn't buy the ticket downstairs, so Mayra didn't get to feed to rays. She was disappointed, but we decided on an impromptu dolphin watching cruise that left from a nearby pier. I was really worried about getting seasick, but we did OK, and saw a few dolphins even though it was a grey, gloomy day and they were a little hard to spot.

I really need to get a handle on my driving/travel anxiety because we had a pretty good trip. next time I need to conjure some better restaurant mojo, I can't say we ate very well.