Yesterday I got spend the afternoon with my friend Erin, her husband, and their 6 year old son. They came down from Philly for the afternoon so we could have a chance to visit before they have their second child next month. Usually when we get together I’ve gone up to Philly, so it was fun to have them come down to Baltimore this time.

After grabbing lunch in our neighborhood we headed down to the aquarium. If you’re not familiar, Baltimore is actually home to the National Aquarium, so it’s one of the better aquariums I’ve ever been to. Since we figured at some point in the next year we’ll wind up going to the aquarium again with our niece and nephew we went ahead and bought a membership since you only have to go twice for that to pay off. The extra bonus of that was getting to avoid the ticket line and also go in whenever we wanted to. The tickets at the aquarium are timed so you can’t just walk up to the window, buy a ticket, and immediately enter unless you’re a member. It was definitely nice to be able to do that yesterday since we weren’t sure exactly when we would get down there.

It had been a few years since I had been to the aquarium for a proper visit, though Paul and I did go down for a behind the scenes tech tour in the past year or so. I hadn’t realized until yesterday that they had stopped doing the dolphin shows. I know that they’ve been considering removing the dolphins from the aquarium, but I hadn’t realized that even though they were still there at this point they had discontinued the actual shows. You can still seem them swimming around in the pools, but they don’t do a show like they used to.

It is a still a great aquarium though and it was fun to walk around and see all the fish and spend some time with friends.