During June 10 to June 21, my family and I went on a road trip to Tennessee (but my mom extended the trip to go to North Carolina so yeah), and to make a long story short: that trip was the most exhausting road trip I have experienced so far. My whole family and I had to climb up/down TWO mountains followed by a whole load of boring stuff that I don’t have any room to fit into this blog.
But I’m not here to talk about the bad stuff about the trip! I’m here to talk about my best (and only good) experience during the entire road trip (since I’m not a pessimist), and that is going to Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies (yes I know there are more Ripley’s Aquariums, but this is the one I went to, so be quiet pls).
It all started when my father was trying to get food for all of my family. My cousins, my sister, and I wanted Subway (even though the company is up to its neck in controversy). So what my family had to do was let my aunt get us kids Subway and then go some places to wait for my other family members to finish their food and pick us up. When we finished eating our sandwiches, all of us went to the aquarium (since we were waiting for the rest of our family to pick us up), and that is where the fun starts.
Ripley’s Aquarium has a lot of fun things to do, but one of my favorite parts of the aquarium was the Shark Lagoon. You could see three types of sharks there: sand tiger, sandbar, and nurse sharks. You could also see sawfish (which btw are HUGE). The experience was fun, but it wasn’t the sharks that scared me, it was the barracuda that gave me the spooks.
Another great part about the aquarium (and probably my best experience there) is that you can feed stingrays, which being the most adorable things ever (they have cat mouths, go to any aquarium with stingrays and see what I mean). We got to feed the stingrays fish, by putting the fish on a steel bar, and watch the rays swim up to the bar and gently take the food off it. When I fed the stingrays, I was lucky enough to feed two gigantic stingrays! The experience was amazing and I hope to do it again someday.
There was a lot that I left out in this blog, like the fact you can touch jellyfish, that you can see one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, and you can see African penguins! I hope anybody that has read this blog goes to Ripley’s Aquarium sometime in their lives, and maybe, just maybe, the experience for them might be the greatest of their lives.
Happy travels!
– Nova Subedi