The Age of Aquariums

This past Sunday, my brother surprised me with a trip to the New York Aquarium, which is on the Coney Island boardwalk in Brooklyn, NY. It was spectacular! I ended up taking more than 1000 photos on the day- 1017 to be exact- which, I determined later, is the second most I've ever taken in one day, and only the second time in my life I've taken more than 1000 photos in a single day. (more on that later)

While I had been through Brooklyn once before, I had never actually gotten out and walked around there- and I certainly never made it to Coney Island! In 2002, I went with a friend to another friend's house out somewhere in the middle of Long Island, and we went through part of Brooklyn to get there. That, however, was before I had a digital camera.

Now, I'm not going to share all 1017 photos, but I will share some I want to talk about...I will start with the Aquarium. I can't say how much I enjoyed this. It is the second aquarium I've visited, but the first time since 2007. (The other is the Toledo Zoo aquarium). With how much I have enjoyed both of them, we've already begun to look for more...found out there are a few on Connecticut that might be on the agenda...thus the name, a play on the song, "The Age of Aquarius".

I don't even know how many fish we saw.

Probably the best individual fish photo I took.

You can actually walk through an aquarium, in the Sharks! building.

I'm not a huge fan of sharks, although I love hammerheads. They had a lot of sharks. Sadly, none were hammerheads though.

Part of the aquarium was still closed and under construction, due to the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Yes, it was THAT devastating. They hope to have the reconstruction finished in 2020. We will be going back again, probably before then.

They had more than just fish, too.

In total, I really recommend looking at my full photo album of pictures from the Aquarium, which you can see by clicking HERE.

The New York Aquarium is right on Coney Island, which- I didn't know before yesterday- is actually the name of the area in Brooklyn. I always thought it was the name of the amusement park that is so famous. In reality, that park is named "Luna Park" although there are multiple amusement parks all together there.

 This is the view of the Cyclone from the NY Aquarium's parking lot. The Cyclone is a wooden roller coaster that dates to 1927, and was built on the site of the world's first ever roller coaster, which was built in 1876. (It was really dark and dreary when we got there- the sun came out while we were in the Aquarium)

The ocean as seen from the Boardwalk! My brother walked down close to the water, I did not. That's him in the picture.

 The Wonder Wheel dates to 1920 and is one of the oldest ferris wheels in the world.

Home of the Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team.

 Life along the boardwalk. The tall silver building on the left is the Aquarium, it's barely visible off in the distance here.

 I was excited to see the Nets store- but my excitement was quickly quashed by the fact that it was closed.

 The Original Nathan's. The one that opened in 1916, and which holds the hot dog eating contest every July 4th, which the countdown on the front of the building is to. We ate there...it was just OK. I've never been a fan of Nathan's hot dogs, but eating at the original Nathan's, on Coney Island...we had to. (Well, technically, we didn't eat there, we went back to the car to eat)

I saw a really big ship coming in. The scale may be hard to tell, but consider this...this is on 120x Digital Zoom. It's the farthest shot I've ever gotten to come in clear. This ship is well over a mile away from me.

All the Coney Island Boardwalk scenes can be found HERE.

I also photo documented the trip. I really enjoyed the trip, because we saw some really incredible stuff, like, oh, Manhattan: (click to enlarge)

Citi Field, home of the Mets

 Some really low-flying planes (this one having just taken off from JFK airport, which we saw)

And, perhaps most exciting to me, the Unisphere!

It was a lot of fun for me, and you can see all the photos HERE.

I did stop off at my card dealer on the way home, to pick up some Cubs cards that I owe to Wrigley Wax. As usual, I ended up finding some for myself too, but I will cover them another time- maybe. I want this post to just be about this awesome adventure I took with my brother.

Oh yeah, about the pictures. When I loaded up all the pictures onto my computer, and realized I had taken over 1000, the question naturally came up if it was my record. As it turns out, it's not, but it does appear to be second.

 Looking over my website, it appears I've cleared the 500 photos in one day mark 12 times, although there is a slight asterisk to that. I determined this by looking through the albums on my website and seeing how many single day events had more than 500 photos in the album.  (I had to do the math on the Adirondack Nationals though.) I may have taken that many or more on the days where I photo documented my 1/64 diecast collection, but since they are in dozens of albums (one for each brand) and came before the dates were properly recorded, I really have no way to ever know. That was in early 2008 but I don't even know the exact day- I do know I spent more than a week documenting the collection, but I don't know how much of that was photographs, my since abandoned Excel file, or just sorting and looking at them. I've saved this chart in my main card statistics chart so I will be keeping it updated from now on. I expect more dates from 2019 will be on the list before too long, as my brother has a whole series of adventures he is planning to take me on.