csberry

This past weekend, Calvin's pack traveled to Chattanooga, Tennessee to visit and sleep in the Tennessee Aquarium. When we arrived at the aquarium, we were gathered into the auditorium for introductions. During this opening discussion, the lead guide (Thaddius...Seriously, his name was "Thaddius!") for the aquarium peppered his talk with questions for the audience. Calvin was a habitual hand raiser. It started off with providing a definition for "tool." Next, they split the whole gang of 80 or so of us into 4 groups.

We spent the first part of the tour in the ocean building. Look! Jellyfish!

Our guide soon had us in the space above the large tank in the ocean building.

Calvin continued to demonstrate his knowledge of basic animal physiology as well as information he gathered about some of the TN Aquarium's creatures and building's trivia. As he mentioned twice during the night, he learned some of the information from watching The Big Aquarium video from the library 1001 times. This picture does a nice job of documenting one of the moments where the guide starts to relay a piece of information to the group and Calvin jumps right in to help her finish providing that tidbit. Bethany was a very nice and patient woman.

Here is Calvin standing in front of the tubes that they dump blended up chum for the smaller fish. Water is pumped through and the food shoots out openings in the "coral" inside the tank at a lower level where the smaller fish can get it without having to compete with larger fish.

After seeing most of what there was to see over there, we headed over to the older building. Although he balked at petting the stingrays, when we came to the sturgeon petting tank it only took a couple of minutes for him to get up the courage to touch one. Immediately upon realizing he wasn't injured from the experience, he was very enthusiastic about touching the fish and helping show the other Cubs that were still iffy how to do it.

Dinner was Papa John's pizza in the library and breakroom at the IMAX theater before going in to see the 3D ocean documentary narrated by Jim Carrey. Around 11pm EST, two of the groups were lead to the "underwater cave" area of the ocean building while the other two groups (which included Calvin and I) were escorted to the central rampway in the old building. Yep, that's where we slept. I suggested to Calvin that we claim a spot on the flat landing at the end of the ramp when it U-turned.

I was paranoid for weeks before that I was going to have a completely sleepless night because there was definitely going to be more than a few snorers in the group of 40ish adults. Shockingly, I never heard a single snore all night. I found that everyone else agreed that no one heard anyone snoring. Since everyone seemed to share observations of being awake overnight and not hearing snoring, I've decided that NO ONE GOT ANY SLEEP. And don't let this smile on Calvin's face at breakfast make you think that he slept well and woke up happy. That boy somehow disguised his cranky bitchiness at the taking of the photo.

The last thing that we got to do on the trip before they kicked us out was to go upstairs and visit with the river otters. Each of the boys also got a chance to throw a smelt to the otters (YUMMY!).