Opry Mills Mall Fun

Since the kids have the week off, we decided to head down to Nashville for some fun. I had been to the Opry Mills Mall once before with the girls, but we only saw a small part, so the kids voted to go to there. When we got there, it was lunchtime. We found a cool restaurant called the Aquarium(many of you have probably heard of it, but we'd never been to one), so we ate there first. The really neat thing about this restaurant is that it is built around a huge aquarium and everything in the place including the coral-like walls looks like you are in the ocean. Every seat has a great view of the aquarium and there are smaller aquariums in there as well. Anyway, the food was a little expensive, but well worth it for the enjoyment the kids had in watching all the fish.
Afterwards, across from the aquarium was a little area where the kids could pet and feed sting rays in an open tank.
The kids really enjoyed that--even Alex(who doesn't like animals) enjoyed petting the sting rays. There were also several other animals they could look at in cages like lizards, frogs, fish, and tarantulas. They really liked it.
Included in the admission, they got unlimited rides on the sea animals carousel. I'm afraid the technicians might have been wishing the kids didn't enjoy the carousel so much, but let's just say, we certainly got our money's worth. :)
Alex and Jarem on the horse with a mermaid-tail (is there a proper name for that?).
Tessa on her favorite--the dolphin! They all had to try out several before they knew what their favorite was!

I left my camera at home thinking we'd just be shopping and stuff. You can imagine my disappointment when we ended up at these fun places where I wanted to take pictures. Alas, I remembered that there was still hope, I had my cell phone. So I took all these pictures with my cell phone, hence the lower quality. :)

Anyway, it turned out to be a fun day, and after all our adventures, we only shopped in one store--Barnes and Noble. We'll have to save the rest for another trip.