I draw the line at animal parks with no animals.

May 31st, 2008 / posted by Jake

We recently decided to spend the day at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, or what used to be known as Marine World. Growing up, I remember visiting the park on numerous occasions and being entertained by numerous dolphin and whale shows, water acrobatics/stunt shows, and lots of other sea animal exhibits. Upon arriving, we cracked open a map and decided that it would be best to arrange our day according to sea-shows schedule, just as my mom used to do. After studying the map I came to the conclusion that surely my map was in chinese because according to the map I was reading, there were maybe 1-2 shows the entire day. Yes, that’s right, 2 shows and we had already missed the first one since it was already noon.

So I gave the map to a Chinese couple hoping they could read it better and we made our way to the first appealing location on the map – Thomas the Train land. Tyler loves Thomas the Train and we thought once he recognized the trains he would go crazy and be so overcome with joy he would just pass out… well we arrived and Tyler just stood and stared at the attractions, looked back to us, and then down to the ground. He was not impressed. But we rode the helicopter and bus and decided to just move to a different part of the park.

I thought it would be fun to see how Tyler reacted to seeing sea animals such as otters, seals, dolphins amd other fun animals. Well he was not impressed by any of it except the stingray attraction. I was quite hesitant at first but it was actually quite fun. The animals feel like giant slugs and are pretty fast and Tyler enjoyed them. Next Tyler and Lindsey walked through the Shark exhibit which had about 2 sharks total, none of which Tyler could really see due to poor lighting so that was a bust. But to our dismay he was very entertained by the public phone booths right around the corner. Actually, when we walked by them he reacted exactly as I had anticipated he would upon arriving at the Thomas the Train exhibits – yah, that’s right. Tyler was ecstatic at the sight of phone booths more than Thomas the Train so we let him play with them for awhile before I decided it was time to encourage him to move onto the next exhibit — monkeys and gorillas.

Upon arriving we learned that these were actually rides and would not be able to see any monkeys or gorillas but nextdoor was a wild-safari ride which looked similar to a Jurassic Park set. It had a lot of over-sized jeeps for the kids so we went on it. It circled around what I had hoped to be a ferocious den of lions and tigers who would be clawing at our tires trying to eat us. Instead it had 2 turtles.

To finish our day we stopped by a water attraction where all the other kids were. We sat down, took Tyler’s shirt off, and let him play in the fountains of water for as long as he wanted.

After all was said and done, it really was a good trip and Tyler did enjoy himself as did we. But if you are going there to see animals, don’t expect to see any. I guarantee you’ll see more animals if you were to walk to your mailbox on any given day than you will at Six Flags. But if you are in the mood for pretty cool phone booths, $12 unlimited soda refills, rides made for adults taller than 8 feet tall, and obnoxious teenagers then by all means spend your day at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom.