Austin is now ranked as the 11th largest city in the U.S. And for such a large city…we have relatively few large attractions.
I’ve started to try to add more fun things to do around Austin and Texas to the blog, such as The Dinosaur Park, Legoland and coming to our very own Pflugerville this Memorial Day is Hawaiian Falls Waterpark.
Last year a new interactive aquarium, Austin Aquarium, opened in north Austin. I’m not really one for crowds, so I waited to go until I thought the crowd might have died down a bit.
Austin Aquarium
When it was just me and the boys, we would head out to do stuff around 10am (when most places open), but now with Maddi we have to be home so she can be in bed by 11:30am so it’s made doing things a little difficult.
I ordered our tickets online (you can save $2 per ticket by ordering online) so we could walk right in at 10am. There weren’t that many people there at that time on a school day so the kids had plenty of room to explore.
As soon as you pay, they ask you to wash your hands before entering the exhibit. You are allowed to touch many of the animals in the exhibits…they just ask that you wash your hands in between.
We found this really cool six armed starfish in one of the first rooms. Both Maddi and Evan were too scared of everything to touch anything, but most of the other kids were trying to touch them.
The sting rays were a little too friendly for all of us. They really wanted someone to feed them or something. They were coming up to the glass and putting their mouths up out of the water.
There were fish and a few other animals like birds and reptiles…and a large turtle that you could feed….but my kids weren’t interested in those either.
The last exhibit was the shark tank. They were pretty busy and swam around a lot. But…my kids weren’t interested!
But the next thing was the gift shop…which they thought was really fun!
If your kids are into sea life and like to touch wild animals, this might be fun for y’all. It’s a small place, but definitely something different for Austin. You might want to Google “Austin Aquarium coupon” before you go and see if you can find one.
Have you been to the Austin Aquarium yet?
