A Holiday to Florida by Margaret MacBeath
I was on holiday in Florida with my family. We went to loads of places and all the theme parks. I was mostly looking forward to the sea-life theme park as I had seen the brochure of Shamu the killer-whale. When I went to my bed that night I was ever so excited that I was going to Sea-life that next day. As I'm an animal lover, I like seeing all different kinds of animal shows. The Sea-life had a lot of attractions and shows.
The first show had really nice exotic birds and parrots. The trainer got a helper out of the audience to feed a small bird, then he asked him to call out the bird's name and it came out from the back of the stage to be fed. It turned out to be an ostrich, which I found quite funny. The poor helper got a bit of a fright; in the end he enjoyed feeding the ostrich.
The second show had a killer-whale called Shamu. It did really good tricks. One of the tricks was when the trainer swam to the bottom of the pool and so did Shamu. Plus it was really good as you could see it on big screens as they had underwater cameras and when they both rose from the pool the trainer came up on Shamu's nose. A second trainer came in on another whale's belly while it swam around. It also loved soaking the entire crowd. They did tricks like spinning around then Shamu came back out with the trainer standing on him like a surfboard which I found really cool. Then you could see Shamu and the trainer going to the bottom of the pool but you could see what was happening under the water with cameras and how Shamu had the trainer on his nose. I found it pretty awesome.
The next show was the dolphin show. There were four dolphins and one was swimming on its belly and doing tricks like waving his tail to the crowd. Two dolphins had a trainer under the water doing full circles and they were guiding him through the water with just his feet. His feet were just on the dolphin's nose which I thought was smart. There were people in the show that were dressed as birds on bungee jump ropes. The people and the dolphins were jumping together and the dolphins liked to soak you as well. We could watch all this on a television screen as well as seeing it live.
The next show was called 'Seymour and Clyde Take Pirate Island.' Seymour and Clyde were sea-lions. Seymour came out of a ship and slid down to the next level where he poked his head through a port-hole at his trainer. Then he shot out as though the ship had hit an iceberg. The trainer said, 'Seymour, take the wheel,' so up he jumped. Then a lovely otter appeared running along the pirate ship in and out of the port-hole. The loudspeaker said, 'Anchors aweigh,' and the otter dropped it in the water. Then Clyde and his trainer who was a pirate came out and started jumping about. They started looking around the ship with Clyde copying his trainer as if he was looking in a mirror and standing up on his tail. The trainer shouted, 'What a big rat that is!' He didn't realise it was an otter. The trainer took Clyde into the crowd and picked a small girl to help them. Clyde lifted his flipper to shake her hand. Clyde and the pirate were looking at the ship from the side of the pool and the pirate said, 'Let's go and see.' Clyde decided to go through the water and got stuck which was very funny. He eventually got free and swam over to the ship. The pirate with Clyde shouted, 'Is anyone there?' and the other pirate appeared with Seymour. Because they were stranded the pirate got out a table and fed Seymour and Clyde some fish. The sea-lions kept pinching fish when the pirate's back was turned. The otter joined in and stole the treasure map but eventually the pirate got it back.
Finally a walrus appeared and took water into its mouth and totally soaked Stuart and I and we smelled like fish all day! All my mum and Errol, my step-dad, could do was laugh big style. The walrus also did lots of tricks like turning around and swimming on his back and waving although he couldn't do too much as he was so fat! I thought the day was totally amazing. It was better than I expected and probably a 'once in a lifetime' journey.
