Genova Aquarium

Yesterday, we took a day trip to visit the Acquario di Genova. We had heard a lot of great things about it as it is the 2nd largest aquarium in Europe and we figured it would make for a perfect indoor family excursion. The kids had a great time, as I'm sure you can imagine. We saw eels, sharks, dolphins, manatees, turtles, frogs, penguins, rays and lots and lots of fish! The aquarium was great, but felt rather constricted and tight in space. Maybe that fact was exaggerated a bit in that every other family in Italy had the same idea to spend one of their final days of vacation at the aquarium. I have never been so thankful for Luca's monkey leash! If he ever escaped it would have been impossible to successfully pursue him through the crowds, and he would not have been a happy camper to be constrained to his stroller the entire time.

Samuel's favorite part of the day was touching the rays. Emma's favorite thing was seeing the tomato frogs and miniature orange frogs (of course)! Luca was excited about everything, never lingering long at any one tank--always wanting to keep moving. I have to admit, I was thankful he did not plunge himself into the tank of rays!

Emma did make a later attempt at touching the rays, after getting over the fact that she would get germs on her arm. She insisted on putting hand sanitizer all the way up to her shoulder after putting her hand in the water.

If it wasn't for the bitter cold winds we might have explored around the port more.

Starting off the tour with a 3D Shark Movie. It was so funny to see the kids trying to reach out and grab the fish.

Emma's tomato frogs

A sea turtle bigger than Emma!

The two-hour drive down to the city port turned out to be more snowy than rainy as predicted. The drive is beautiful, however, to pass through the coastal mountain ranges there are an incredible amount of tunnels and just one main highway for all traffic. After leaving the aquarium around 3pm, we encountered a road block due to an accident in the tunnel that we later found out killed 2 people. Thanks to our GPS we were able to navigate our way through some mountain passes that had us gripping the wheel and door handles in our attempt to get home. We made several attempts to reenter the Autostrada along the way but the highway had been shut down in both directions by that time due to icy conditions. We kept driving slowly along back roads (around 90km in distance, not speed) and were finally able to reenter back on to the main road in Alessandria. This detour added 1.5 hours to our trip, but we were so thankful to have arrived home safely!