At this point I think pretty much everyone in the city is aware of the Orlando Eye, err the Coca-Cola Orlando Eye. Proper nomenclature and all that. It’s hard to miss as it towers over International Drive. What most people might not know is it’s not the only attraction there. The building also houses two more main attractions: the SEALIFE Aquarium Orlando and Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. There are also numerous restaurants and other attractions just outside the building within the complex, like Skeletons: Museum of Osteology, but we are focusing on the inside of the building, known as I-Drive: 360. You can buy a ticket to just one attraction, two attractions, or all three. Like most things in Orlando, the more you buy, the better the value.
My friend Lacey and I were going to do all three late one Wednesday morning; I was running late but had Duffy in tow. She had been to a Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas and had ridden the London Eye, but never been to the ones here. I think she was more excited than I was after I told her I would be writing about our adventure for the blog. (I hadn’t told her about it yet.)
The lobby isn’t overly large, but it has a food court with four or five counter service stations and some tables and chairs. There’s a bathroom in one corner. The SEALIFE Aquarium is to your right, Madame Tussauds is on the left and the Orlando Eye is straight ahead. Each one has its own ticket counter and two lines: one for people who already have tickets and those who need to purchase them.
Cue the Jaws theme.
We started with the SEALIFE Aquarium. There’s a vast shift in lighting as you head in: it gets dark and hard to see quickly. They stopped us for pictures in front of a green screen, and the next room seemed to be a holding area for a preshow. There was a screen with a counter going down, but the guy just gave us the safety briefing and opened the door instead of having us wait. It led into a circular room surrounded by fish in tanks that swam in one direction around you. The ceiling is a movie so it appears that you just stepped underwater, and there was a group of sharks discussing whether are not they like to eat humans. (With Australian accents.) Maybe it would have made more sense if we had come in at the beginning. Then three more characters swam in from off screen and started telling us again in Australian accents that our tour begins this way. I guess after Finding Nemo people expect sharks to sound like they’re from Down Under.
The first exhibit you come to is a series of Ocean Caves. They’re smaller tanks with lion fish and similar creatures with pop ups in the middle so you can crawl under the tank to stand up and be surrounded by fish. We were disappointed they didn’t come in our size. There was a half-moon shaped exhibit where you could experience the almost same effect if you were over three feet tall. Then there was a wall of jellyfish and you move into a shipwreck themed area dedicated to sharks. There’s a wall of touch screens where you can learn about sharks… and for some reason manta rays. Is a manta ray a type of shark and no one told me?
Most of the SEALIFE aquarium is one massive tank in the center that you make your way around and has multiple viewing spots and then lots of smaller tanks around the outside. I counted several different sharks in the big tank and at least two sea turtles. There were also divers in there working on cleaning something but I couldn’t tell what.
That is a shark under my foot.
The coral reef section was the most impressive and actually had adult sized viewing spots where you could go beneath the tank to look up at the fish. The colors were bright and beautiful, and it makes me even sadder the Great Barrier Reef is now dead. From there you head into the 360º viewing tunnel, which is the only one in Orlando. You stand with glass under your feet and all around you as you watch the fish swim by. It took a little bit of waiting but I had a shark swim underneath me! Something that I certainly hope never happens again, unless I go back or am somewhere else where it’s nice and safe and there’s something between me and the shark. He was only about three or four feet long, pretty average size for a black tip reef shark… with twelve rows of teeth.
Ted the sea turtle.
We continued onto the next set of exhibits. We passed the cute little seahorses and saw our second of the two sea turtles housed there, a massive rescue named Ted. There was a pool of sting rays that were extremely friendly 
and went back and forth in front of us several times. The next room is dedicated to the Florida Everglades, something that I assume is probably unique to this SEALIFE Aquarium. There are several varieties of turtles and fish. The next room is a kids’ play area and the final area is a touch pool with star fish and sea anemones, and I had flash backs to Finding Dory this time. It ends incredibly abruptly, I had no idea that was going to be the last exhibit. You enter a gift shop where they show you the photos you had taken earlier in a photo album, already printed, and try to get you to buy it. I guess seeing it printed is supposed to entice you to buy it, but all I could think was “Well, you already wasted the ink and paper.” So we headed on out and across the lobby.
I spent quite a bit of time debating if this should be one Adventure Report or three separate ones. Check back for the posts on Madame Tussauds and the Orlando Eye itself.
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