I woke up still fighting a cold, so decided to take it easy for the day. Other than being a mucus factory, I wrote a blog and posted it — except for some reason, Buffer decided NOT to share it to my networks. Not sure why, but it didn’t share. I know people were reading the blog today, a few had trouble loading the pictures early on, but I assumed it was my longer post, not the “travel logistics” one. Oh well, it’s live and I’ve reshared it to the networks manually. Weird.

I decided I would do the Audobon Aquarium to see the penguins, and if time and body permitted, I would consider airboats or evening cruises or music or late night food cravings. As it turned out, the Aquarium and Insectarium were all I could handle today besides a nap!

I headed towards the Aquarium along Canal Street, a supposed 11 minute straight walk. Well, except I hit a shake shack really fast and they had burgers, so voila, lunch. I have seen mention of snow cones or snow balls, but haven’t seen them physically yet. In the meantime, shakes will do.

I went past Caesar’s casino, a rooftop rotating restaurant, a New Orleans Walk of Fame, and mostly crept along at a snail’s pace in the heat. It was damn hot again today. Our family loves penguins, though, so the only destination that mattered was the Aquarium.

Before I got to the penguins, I got to see a bunch of other marine animals.

American alligators without pigment, baby alligators, even butterflies. Plus birds, fish, sharks, rays, etc.

But the goal was penguins and even saw the feeding (a much more sedate experience than the one in Boston!).

The penguin exhibit was great. You can get right to the glass, the penguins are literally an inch of glass away from you, so you can get up close and see them playing. You can even interact with them — if you put your fingers near the glass, they’ll think you have fish and try to eat your fingers. There were about 23 African penguins and they participate in the broader research program that the Boston Aquarium is part of too. They log every little bit of their penguins’ lives, particularly how much they eat.

Here’s the weird part of the day though. I got talking to one of the staff, relatively new, been with the Aquarium less than a year. Mainly on the outreach side, and according to him, you need to be passionate about animals and articulate, but high school was sufficient for the job. If you work behind the exhibits, you need a college degree. His friend only had high school too, but he was really passionate about insects and bugs, so he got hired on the insectarium side of things (I met him in the butterfly exhibit).

Anyway, I was sitting watching the penguins at one point, and nobody else was there. It was just me and the penguins. It was like NO ONE was at the aquarium. With school back in session, and summer effectively over, attendance was down to about 400 bodies for the day. From an average of 1800-2000 and peak crowds of 3200. It was glorious. Later, down by the large tank, I was sitting in a room staring at fish and sea turtles, and again, for short periods of time as people drifted in and out, I was by myself just chilling.

It was a good day to visit. I did a virtual simulator with tiger shark diving, had my picture taken with the traditional aquarium background, spent too much for snacks at the little cafes, etc. I had my water bottle with me, and I have to say I was disappointed. I had poured REALLY cold water in it earlier, and with the material it is made of, some sort of silicon I guess, I thought it was designed to keep it cold. Not really. It wasn’t warm, but that was about it. And tying it to my bag was a bad idea. I tried drinking from it without removing from the bag and ended up wearing about a 1/3 of what I drank. Oh well.

I trudged back to the hotel, and my feet felt every single step in the heat. My compression socks help in some ways, sure, but they sure make everything that much hotter. Whine, whine, whine.

I got back to the hotel, with a small stop for some extra pop, and crashed for a nap. Talked to Andrea and Jacob to hear all about his first day of Grade 11 (yay penguin!), and then I had to figure out dinner.

I decided I’d settle for dinner downstairs in the lobby area while reading, and then hit the in-hotel pantry which has more snacks than I expected, plus some basic deli stuff. I grabbed some stuff for the morning.

And found out they have cherry snowballs in pint-size containers. Wow, what a find. It took me almost a half of an hour to devour upstairs in my room, chipping away at it with a plastic spoon.

I managed to transfer all my photos to the laptop, or at least copy them, including a ton of short videos. Too much to transfer now to the blog, but I’ll add to future posts eventually when they’re scrubbed, tweaked and uploaded to Flickr properly.

Oh, and just for fun, I got mistaken for Lee Goldberg in the deli area. I don’t look much like Lee, although we both have short hair and round faces. But hey, he’s a successful Hollywood writer, so I’ll take the compliment.

To close out the night, I grabbed a picture out the window at the end of the hall of the waterfront and French Quarter at night. I’ll try to remember to grab one during the day.

Tomorrow #Bouchercon2025 starts. Let the notetaking and learning begin!