Aquarium on a Rainy Day

Sunday morning was rainy and very windy, so we had a relaxing morning around the house. We ate breakfast and chatted with D for a while and then took showers. As lunch time came around, we headed off to Manteo on Roanoke Island and went to the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. A very good activity for a rainy day at the beach. The wind was so strong, our car was actually getting blown crossing the bridge on the bridge.

We toured around the aquarium for a couple of hours checking out all the exhibits.

The focus of this aquarium is diversity of life that lives in the Outer Banks and surrounding waters, from the freshwater lakes and rivers, to estuarine sounds, to the open oceans.

It's a rather small aquarium and doesn't have exhibits of fish from every corner of the world.

But by focusing just on native creatures in nearby waters, it provides visitors with a deeper appreciation for life close to home.

And the diversity of life in this small section of the world is absolutely amazing.

We saw frogs, toads, lizards, venomous snakes, alligators, river otters, and an amazing number of beautiful fish, including wrasses and sea horses.

They even have a "touch tank" where visitors can pet a few sea creatures, such as stingrays and horseshoe crabs. Towards the end, we watched a fish feeding in the Open Oceans exhibit, with the largest collection of sharks in North Carolina.

The sharks are fed separately – this was a feeding for the other fish. But of course, you can’t really stop a hungry shark. After the feeding, we browsed the gift store and then headed back towards Nags Head. For dinner, we stopped at Outer Banks Brewing Station. This brewpub is wind powered. And on a windy day like today, it looked like the turbine was going to take off. I had a burger and a Yuletide IPA to drink and Sandy had crab legs. Any time we go to the beach, Sandy has to have her crab legs. She really liked them from the brewpub, so this was somewhere we’d have to come back to. After dinner, it stopped raining and the sky finally cleared up a bit. We headed back to the house and watched movies and drank beers with D and his dogs.