Sea Center Texas

Me: Aww, I’ll take a photo of Forest looking at the turtle. *Looks through camera* ahhhhhh, nooo, don’t touch the turtle! Kids are fast.

The eel was ‘spaghetti’ according to Forest!

Chris has been working in the Freeport area over the last week so last weekend Forest and I went down to visit him. My original plans were to go down on Friday night but I came down with some kind of stomach bug so the trip was delayed until Saturday morning. It has been several years since I went down to that area, I once went to the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory with Keely and went and saw the San Bernard Oak a different time. I made a list of various places that I could take Forest while we were waiting for Chris to get off work but due to the stomach bug we only made it to Sea Center Texas.

The center is a Texas Parks and Wildlife operated aquarium and education building with fish hatcheries and a boardwalk and wetland out back. The building is small but the admission is free so it was all well worth the hour of entertainment for Forest, and we walked ’round and ’round and ’round the exhibits. There’s a touch tank, too, with hermit crabs, blue crabs, anemones, and small fish. Outside, the weather was rather dismal with clouds and a chilly wind, so we kept our trip down the boardwalk fairly quick. There were a few ducks and a snowy egret but many other birds. The front part of the wetland area is freshwater and the back part transitions to salt marsh with several clumps of black mangroves along the boardwalk.

Forest had never seen those huge metal monocular lenses that are often on boardwalks for observing birds so I had to hold him up to the one they had and try to get him to shut one eye and look through. I’m not quite sure he got it but he had a lot of fun with me holding him up and I had to repeat the task a few times before I managed to convince him to move along.

For a free exhibit (donations accepted! and there’s a gift shop, too!) it was a great stop for entertaining a kid for a little while and definitely something worthwhile if you are in the Lake Jackson/Freeport area.