A little sea lion decided that she needed a vacation! Hotel owners in California recently found a baby seal lounging in a chair.
Shane Pappas, manager of the Pantai Inn, an all-suite hotel in La Jolla, California as shocked to find a baby seal in one of the lounge chairs on Tuesday morning.
"I received an email while I was getting ready for work stating that we had a baby sea lion in our courtyard," Pappas told ABC News. "I called and said, 'What are you talking about?'"
A hotel surveillance video shows the animal crawling from the ocean to the hotel. The seal made quite the trek as she climbed up a set of stairs to reach a road from the beach, crossed the road, and then wound up in the courtyard of the hotel.
The seal finally decided to relax on a comfortable lounge chair in the hotel court yard. The seal was eventually removed by officials from SeaWorld. The rescue took 25 minutes.
We had to stop for photo ops and the SeaWorld official did a Q&A with the kids staying on the property," Pappas told ABC.
The seal was taken to the Animal Care Complex a few miles south of the hotel so that it could be rehydrated and released back into the wild, KGTV-TV reports.
Pappas was certainly surprised by the rare event. "We have a lot of seagulls and an osprey who visits but, outside of that, no, we've never had anything like this," Pappas said. "It was pretty unique."
It isn't rare for young seals to wind up in strange places this time of year, Kevin Robinson, a SeaWorld senior animal care specialist said.
"Usually, we rescue the seals from backyards and public restrooms or they swim up the San Diego River," Robinson told AOL News in 2010. Robinson has just rescued a seal from under a car at the time.
It is definitely rare to find a sea lion hanging out in a lounge chair by the pool though. However in 2009, Robinson had to rescue a sea lion baby that crossed a field, a shopping center and four lanes of traffic before it wound up in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
