Things to Do in Albany, GA with Kids: Chehaw Park and the RiverQuarium

With kids, Albany's two main draws are Chehaw Park, an 800-acre park with a zoo, a splash pad and camping, and the Flint RiverQuarium, a downtown aquarium built around a 175,000-gallon natural spring. They sit on opposite sides of town rather than next door to each other, so most families pick one as the main event and treat the other as a shorter add-on, or split them across two days if they're also camping at Chehaw.

Which one to do first

If your day has a time limit, start at the Flint RiverQuarium: one admission covers all of it, and it opens and closes on one schedule. It's built around the Blue Hole Spring, an outdoor tank fed by a natural spring that holds 175,000 gallons and runs 22 feet deep, and the aquarium cares for more than 160 species and roughly 1,300 animals in total. The building itself opened in 2004, designed by architect Antoine Predock around the biology, geology and hydrology of southwest Georgia, which is why it looks less like a standard aquarium box and more like a piece of the landscape.

Featured location Flint RiverQuarium Albany, United States The displays are arranged to follow the course of the Flint River, taking in habitats of the wider basin drained by the Flint, Chattahoochee and Apalachicola rivers.

Chehaw asks for more time and more planning around two separate tickets. Park entry gets you the grounds, the playground and the splash pad; the zoo is a second pass on top of that. The zoo currently keeps 234 specimens across more than 73 species, including cheetahs, black rhinoceros, red wolves and American black bears. It has deep roots: animals moved in from Albany's old Tift Park Zoo between 1975 and 1977, and it officially opened as the Chehaw Wild Animal Park in October 1977. It also held Association of Zoos and Aquariums accreditation from 1997 to 2018, which is worth knowing if that kind of credential matters to you when picking a zoo.

Featured location Chehaw Park Albany, United States Two sides are bounded by a clearwater bayou at the junction of the Kinchafoonee and Muckalee Creeks. Ground cover ranges from cypress swamp to climax hardwood forest and burn-managed pine and wiregrass.

What not to miss

At the RiverQuarium, Moonshine the albino alligator in the Spring Run Creek exhibit is the animal kids remember: it's one of fewer than 100 albino alligators known to exist, and because albino alligators can't camouflage themselves, one like Moonshine could never survive being released into the wild. The Cypress Creek Aviary is an open-air walk-through with a green-winged macaw, ducks, herons, egrets, geese and ibises, which gives younger kids somewhere to slow down after the darker indoor tanks.

At Chehaw, the zoo's headline animals are the cheetahs and the black rhinoceros, but the park side has its own draw for families that never touches the zoo ticket: the Splash Park and Play Park run seasonally from 9:30am until dark, are included in ordinary park admission, and are free if you're a member. There's also an 18-hole disc golf course on the grounds, the Joshua W. Franklin Memorial Disc Golf Course, with access included in park admission and discs available at the ticket booth if nobody brought their own.

Tickets and saving money

At the Flint RiverQuarium, adults pay $9.00 and youth aged 4-12 pay $6.50, with children 3 and under free, as of September 2026. Seniors 62 and over pay $8.00, college students with ID pay $5.50, military with ID get $1 off per ticket, and non-school groups of 15 or more get a 10% discount.

Chehaw's pricing has two layers. Park-only entry, which covers the grounds, playground, splash pad and disc golf but not the zoo, costs $3.50 for adults aged 13-61, $2.00 for children aged 4-12, and $2.00 for seniors or military. A zoo pass is priced separately on top of that: $8.00 for adults, $5.00 for children aged 4-12, $7.00 for seniors 62+, $5.00 for military, and free for children 3 and under. So a family of two adults and two zoo-age kids pays for four park passes plus four zoo passes if everyone wants to see the animals, not one combined family rate.

If you'd rather stay over than drive home, Chehaw's campground sits inside the same 800-acre complex as the zoo, so you can walk over during zoo hours the next morning. As of September 2026 a full-hookup RV site runs $33 a day, a regular-hookup RV site $25, a tent site $20, a standard cabin $40 a day and a deluxe cabin $80 a day, plus a $15 non-refundable reservation fee and a $25 pet fee if you're bringing a dog to a cabin.

Getting there and with kids

The Flint RiverQuarium is at 117 Pine Avenue, Albany, GA 31701, in the downtown riverfront area. Chehaw Park is at 105 Chehaw Park Road, Albany, Georgia, a separate part of town from downtown, so budget drive time between the two rather than assuming a quick walk.

For accessibility, the RiverQuarium is certified sensory-inclusive through KultureCity: staff are trained to recognize sensory overload, free sensory bags with noise-canceling headphones, fidget tools, verbal cue cards and weighted lap pads are available, and the Eric and Carol Pittman Sensory Room gives an overstimulated child somewhere calm to reset before you carry on.