Sunday December 8th 2024

I finally got to visit the Christmas festivities at Sea World on Saturday. I have allowed the weather to influence my last few attempts to visit the park. Saturday wasn’t the warmest day, but I was bundled up enough to stay warm even after sunset. I arrived at the park a little after 4PM and stayed until a few minutes after the 10PM closing time.

My focus at Sea World was primarily the Christmas shows and decorations. I only visited a few of the regular areas. The first show on my agenda was the O’Wondrous Night show. This can best be summarized as a musical comedy telling of the birth of Christ. It contains puppets, animals and a choir that dances and sings lots of songs primarily in a gospel style. The puppeteers also sing. Toward the end of the show the puppets get replaced by live animals. There were goats and sheep, a donkey, doves, lamas and/or alpacas and finally camels. It is a fun and interesting show with minimal staging and lots of energy.

The Sesame Street Christmas parade of Muppet characters was a good filler while I waited for the next more adult entertainment. I recognized the characters as belonging to Sesame Street, but don’t ask me to name them. I know Elmo, but that’s about it. The parade is more of a song and dance show. Once the parade route is filled with the floats with characters, they stop and the characters start dancing in the street.

The final show of the night was an ice skating show. There are about eighteen skaters. They include an ensemble group of twelve, an ice dancing pair, a pairs skating duo and a male and female solo performer. I needed to be in the stands more than half an hour ahead of time to get a decent seat. Once the show starts it is very fast paced. The half hour show was over quickly and was followed by a few minutes of fireworks. It is nice to have a seat to watch fireworks.

The traffic getting home was a nightmare. Once I cleared the Sea World traffic, I picked up the Disney World Traffic. It was followed by more random traffic at my exit off of Interstate 4. It took over an hour to travel a distance that is a little over twenty minutes on the rare occasions that traffic isn’t an issue.

At the base camp, over the last few days I’ve continued to work on the night stand for my bedroom. It is now completely assembled, stained and gotten its first coat of polyurethane. In needs two or three more coats of poly before I declare it done. I’ve already started planning the end table to go beside my sofa in the living room. That is the next project.