Last Summer Adventure

With all of the excitement this week, I didn't get to post about our excitement last weekend. 

We have always tried to do one last hurrah before school starts--just a day trip to celebrate the end of summer. Unfortunately, the weather was not feeling very cooperative. Fortunately, one of Issa's former teachers turned us on to the Greensboro Science Center. It's part science center, part aquarium, and part zoo, and as it turns out, their feature exhibit right just happens to be pirates right now. My people love pirates. So...off we went.

Per usual, I took the camera with grand intentions. I took so few. We started in the pirate exhibit, and we were all terribly entertained by the hurricane tube:

You experience Hurricane 1 winds. Thankfully, there are no pictures of me as I didn't think this through and spent my time in the tube holding my skirt down.

The boys loved sailing the virtual pirate ship through a storm:

But the highlight was this robotic arm. Most of the exhibit features real treasure and pieces of an actual pirate ship. They also have the underwater robot that recovered these treasures from far deeper than people can dive. And...we got to try picking up a coin with the actual arm that they used:

It's way more difficult than it looks.

After a brief tour of the bodies exhibit (from which I am almost recovered), we headed out to the zoo. Of course I didn't take any pictures of the tortoises, tigers, or various primates that we watched play and explore. But I did get pictures of the kids and goats...which we see every weekend at the farm:

The kids still find these kinds of pictures and statues hysterical:

My fierce pirates:

We ended our tour at the aquarium, where we watched otters and penguins play, sharks hunt, and rays glide. And...we got to pet many, many rays. It was the highlight for the kids.

We will definitely be going back to explore the rest of the museum soon! Maybe I'll be a bit better photographer...probably not.