Florida Day 7: Clearwater Beach

 On Friday we went to Clearwater Beach.  It was about a 2 hour drive to get to Clearwater Beach.  A night or two before, Kjirstin and I ran to Walmart and the Dollar Tree to find boogie-boards and sand tools to take to the beach.  

Once we got to the beach we rented a little umbrella cabana because there was no shade anywhere without one.  

   

The kids had a lot of fun playing in the water.  Clearwater Beach is on the Gulf side, so there aren't really any big waves.  That is good for kids, but not great for boogie-boarding.

At lunch time all the kids tried to cram into the tiny umbrella for shade while they ate.  Isaac was standing outside holding his sandwich in one hand while talking.  Suddenly a seagull dove out of the sky and knocked the sandwich right out of his hand.  Then about 30 of them dove down and started fighting over the sandwich.  It was insane.

Then Isaac started telling Luke what happened as he walked up holding his sandwich.  Isaac was just saying, "Luke, watch out or the seagulls will steal your sandwich" when the exact same thing happened to Luke.  

I was worried we were going to have to find somewhere to go buy a second lunch if the birds kept stealing everyone's food.

After we spent a few hours at the beach we decided to go over to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium (CMA).  My kids watched a movie called "Dolphin Tale" about a dolphin named Winter that was rescued from a fishing net, but the back part of the dolphin's tail was damaged and they made a prosthetic so she could swim.  CMA has some live cameras where you can watch the 2 dolphins from those movies, Hope and Winter, swim.  It was Sophie's wish to go to CMA and see Winter in real life.  

 

So we decided to check it out to fulfill Sophie's dream.  (But CMA was really quite expensive to get into and there really weren't that many fish.  I was expecting it to be a big aquarium, but it was actually a rescue center.  So they try to rehabilitate animals and hopefully re-introduce them to the wild.  Therefore they didn't have any aquariums that were designed to just see cool things.)  I thought it was not worth the money we paid to go there, but Kjirstin said she saw Sophie's face as she walked into the room and looked at Winter for the first time.  And she said that if I would have seen that, it would have been worth every cent.  I'll admit it was cool to see Winter, although she was swimming without the prosthetic at the time.

 

After trying to stretch our visit at CMA to last most of the afternoon we decided to head back to Orlando.  Unfortunately the traffic was terrible and it took a really long time to get back.  We were planning to eat dinner once we reached Orlando, but traffic was so slow we had to pull off and eat on the way.  But that allowed us to go to Fazoli's, Isaac's favorite restaurant (that has been out of business in Utah for many, many years).  

We also went to a Thai ice-cream place called "32 Below Rolled Ice Cream".  We got some weird ice cream balls called Mochi and some ice cream they spread really thin and then use a spatula to roll it up like a tortilla.  It was strange, but fun.

Overall Clearwater was probably my least favorite part of the trip, mainly due to driving time.  But it was very nice to have a more relaxed day.  Next time I think we will have to schedule a day like this in between some of the busier days.