Discovery Cove

 

Yesterday we spent the day at Sea World's Discovery Cove. I had been wanting to do this for a while, and when they sent me an email a few months back with a fairly big discount for Sea World Passholders I went ahead and booked a day.  Discovery Cove is a fairly small park, with limited admission and food and some drinks included.

The main feature of the park is a large natural looking pool where you can get close to Dolphins; you even get to "swim" with them. There's also a lazy river that passes through a bird aviary, and two other pools, the Oasis which has otter and monkey areas, and another larger one that has fish and rays where guests can snorkel. We went ahead and splurged on a cabana that was right on the latter pool, the Great Reef.

I was a little disappointed. The food at the breakfast and lunch buffets was okay but not great, and we weren't that impressed by the lazy river; the current was a little slow to just sit and float, the fairly large variation in depth didn't make it easy to navigate. 

My biggest complaint was the price of the photo packages.  When you're already paying a fairly high price for entry and the dolphin encounter, having to fork out more than 200 bucks for the photos of the dolphin encounter is a bit much. I think it was worth doing once, but don't plan on going back.