The day before had been spent doing a lot of driving and clambering up steep steps and over historical areas as we’d visited Tintagel Castle in Cornwall and we’d provisionally floated the idea before of perhaps sticking to the area of our hotel the day after instead of venturing northwards into Gloucestershire or westwards into Wales to see what delights either had. Feeling like I needed a break from being in the car we went with that decision and spent our wedding anniversary traipsing around Weston-super-Mare, engaging in a few touristy things, the first of which was a visit to the SeaQuarium, Weston’s aquarium on a small pier on the beach. We’d been to the aquarium in Bristol just a couple of days earlier and we knew that by size and quality of exhibits it probably wouldn’t compare too well but we’re fond of an aquarium and went with open minds.
The Weston-super-Mare SeaQuarium does manage to pack in quite a bit more than you expect from its apparent size from outside. One area where it is superior to a lot of other sealife exhibits we’ve seen is that it’s considerably brighter in a lot of places which aids in photography, always a tricky area when visiting these places as you have to ramp the ISO up massively high, often have to fight with the camera to hit the focus correctly, and have to accept lots of noise in the resulting pictures.
There had been nobody else in the SeaQuarium when we first arrived which wasn’t that surprising with it being a Tuesday at the end of October but we were pleased to see close to a dozen were present by the time we left. As expected, it wasn’t the most amazing aquarium we’ve visited but there was more than enough to see for anyone who likes these sorts of places.
As Halloween was upon us there was a section of the building given over to scary exhibits. My wife, suspecting (correctly) that such a place would contain a spider stayed away but I ventured inside the dark area. Some leaf insects were surprising additions as I don’t really consider them terrifying to anybody. A coiled, giant millipede was motionless, as was the anticipated tarantula at the back of its home. The clever area was a glass room next to which was a section you could enter and stick your head up into a perspex bowl to get up close with whatever was inside. I’ll admit that my heart was racing as my suspicion was that there would be more spiders and while I’m nowhere near as bad as my wife this wouldn’t be something I’d like to experience. The darkness in the room made it difficult to see anything which obviously sent the imagination into overdrive but once I’d actually spotted the terror I called my wife in for a look. Rats. We love rats. Adrenalin flowed away nicely. A nice little exhibit by Weston-super-Mare’s SeaQuarium.
