Down By The (Mandalay) Bay

It's crazy that it has taken two weeks to get this dad-burn thing posted, but we wanted to share another adventure to which Ian has been looking forward all summer. I went to a meeting at the Four Seasons in May and wandered by the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay (the buildings are connected) and brought Ian back a brochure-- he liked the sharks so much that he wanted us to read the brochure to him at bedtime for about two weeks! Ian is standing by one of the first saltwater tanks you come to when you get into the exhibit and is holding the audio wand that tells you about all of the animals in the different displays. Daddy wanted to listen to all the morbid details and pause thoughtfully in front of each tank to take in the scene... based on who is holding the audio wand in the picture you can probably guess
Shark Reef is one of only a few places with a mature Komodo Dragon in captivity. I guess a few weeks back some divers drifted away from their dive site and ended up getting marooned on an island out in the South Pacific for a couple of days. They learned firsthand that Komodo Dragons will eat pretty much anything or anyone if given the chance. I tried to explain this interesting tidbit of knowledge to Ian. He was actually quite enthralled and asked, "Daddy, let me see the camera." Ahhh.... Bestowing knowledge on my children. It's a great feeling.
Ian liked to see the big fish; this tank was being fed when we got there and it was cool to see the different kinds of animals eat; some of them nibbled on the shrimp dropped down in the nets, some of them chomped down on submerged heads of lettuce and some of them swam around looking for more... entertaining food. It is probably good that we didn't see any of the live feedings going on; when we were at Cabela's and saw them feeding goldfish to the bass, Ian was scolding the bass and rooting for the goldfish. With the funny lighting and the plexiglass it was hard to get good pictures in there.
We went with our friends Dan and Christy Cereghino. Dan is a clerk at Jones Vargas with me and he is finishing up his last year of school at Fordham in New York. Dan and Christy have two little boys. Nick will be three in October and Andrew was born in April. Unfortunately, that means that we were man-on-man with all the kids... so no pictures of all of us came out. About five seconds after this picture was taken, Nick (at left, with Dan) took off while we were trying to figure out how to get a better picture. (The display we are in front of is reactive-- as you walk past it, the picture ripples as if you were moving through the water-- cool, but hard to photograph.)
We were standing at the confluence of several large corridors and we couldn't see Nick anywhere; to make matters worse, Andrew had just blown out his diaper and Christy was, um, indisposed trying to rectify that particular catastrophic diaper failure. Jenny took Ian and stayed close while looking East, I went North and Dan went South. I ran all the way back into the casino (a couple hundred yards) and couldn't spot Nick anywhere. I called down to a security guard on the next level down as I passed the stairs, and by the time I got my point across I think I had freaked him out more than just a little bit (I'm probably lucky that I didn't get tased or something). I figured that Nick could not have gotten as far as I did and I headed back. Thankfully, Dan had found Nick a hundred yards down the (thankfully deserted) south corridor. It got all of our hearts pumping there for a minute!
If you get a chance to got to the Shark Reef, we highly recommend it-- the fish were beautiful and the displays were incredibly detailed. Ian had a great time and I was enthralled, too. Just hang on to the kids-- you don't need any more thrills than you can get from the fish!