Fun day in Monterey today. We ended up doing the Aquarium first. The new jellyfish exhibit was kind of cool, but it was mostly art inspired by or arranged around jellyfish, and I'd just as soon look at the spiffy little critters on their own. They had one room though with a big tank and a lot of mirrors, so it looked like you were in an infinite hallway of jellyfish. That was neat. I saw one of the Ocean Sun Fish that I like so much in the Outer Bay exhibit, but I couldn't find any of my favorite little diving birds. Phooey. I also managed to pet a manta ray, which is difficult since even in the touch pool they usually huddle up in the back where you can't reach them. I do like the Aquarium. I realized after a bit that I was saying "Ooh! This is one of my favorites!" about almost everything, so the term "favorite" doesn't really mean a lot there :-)

After the Aquarium we went on a whale-watching trip. The last time I had done that was years ago with Jim and Mom and Lacey, in a little bitty motor boat, and I remember trying to stay ahead of all the big touristy ships making all their noise and scaring the whales away. Well, this time I was on the big ship. Oh well. I kind of wish we could have just stayed still for a bit to see if they whales would relax about swimming near us, but we mostly just chased them around. We saw spouts of a few gray whales, but nothing very close or exciting. I'd like to go out again sometime in the summer when the humpbacks and blues are around. So anyway, in terms of whales it was not a great success, but it was fun to be out on the ocean for a couple hours.

Here are a few pictures that I took. After a few shots at the aquarium, though, I realized my battery was about dead, so I just saved it for a few more on the boat. So there's not many.