Day Seven Gatorland

The highly anticipated Day 7 :)

Last full day and the kids were up early again, they would not let us sleep in on our vacation.

Today were are heading to Gatorland, heard that it was a good cheap place to go.

So we enter Gatorland through a huge gator head, and as soon as you go in there are pools full with gators (smelly gators), but also the tropical birds that we have been seeing all over Florida.  The birds were right in with the gators and had no fear, thought this was weird.

So after looking at all the little gators you move onto the bigger water areas, in these are the bigger boys and girls, so looked well over 10' long and very wide.  These were the big ones and you could get really close as the boardwalk was only about 2' above the water.  They were definitely intimidating.

We walked around looking at all the different reptiles and birds that are in gatorland, there were tropical birds (cranes or herons) walking around, you could get within feet of them.  Kept an eye on the kids to make sure one of the bigger birds did not try and take them lol

Miranda and Lex went into the aviary and had a number of birds landing on them, it was really cool.  Matthew and I came in after woulds.  Thank god no one got pooped on

After that we checked out the white or albino gators they were huge and cool looking.

At this point we were all getting hungry so we headed out to the van (as you could not bring the food in) to have some lunch.

Now that lunch was done we explored some more, they had this look out tower that you could go up to the top and see all the gators and birds in this wetlands area.  Was really interesting because almost all the trees were full of the birds and there nests and they were full of little baby birds.  Of course the gators are sitting underneath waiting for one to fall.  Still very interesting was the fact that these birds were walking in the water right beside the gators and nothing happened, really weird.

After that we decide it was time to hit the splash pad and it was super hot.  So we took the kids over and changed them into there swim suites and they had a blast running around and playing with the other kids.  The splash pad was small but that kids loved it.

While they kids were playing in the splash pad I went over and checked out the gator jumping show, just caught the tail end and it was not too bad got to see some guys (Billy Bob and Jimbo, just part of the show) feeding the gators, trying to get them to jump up high to reach the food.

I headed back to the splash pad and gathered up the children (including Miranda) and we took a look at some huge tortoises. One was as big as the bush in front of our house, they do not move while we were watching them. Then checked out some long snakes and then continued our walk around.

We arrived just in time for the Upclose Encounters show, the two guys putting on the show were really funny. They had a number of crates that contained different animals, they gave two out to two ladies in the crowd and had them hold out there hands as they placed the contents in their hands. We saw a few big spiders (thank god they did not ask Miranda to hold one, she would have tossed it and ran back to Canada) and a few snakes. A gecko even made an appearance during the show running around the crates. At the end of the show the had four people hold a python, it was at least 8 feet long. At the end of the show for $5 you could get a chance to hold the python, so of course Miranda wanted to (I would have paid $20 to get her to hold the spider :) ). Her and Lex (she loves to touch everything) went up and got their pictures taken. Matthew wanted nothing to do with it.

Shortly after that it started to rain so we made our way to the souvenir shop and let the kids pick something out. Matthew picked an alligator puppet and Lex (of course) got a alligator stuffed animal.

We then headed to Target (ya :p) Miranda wanted to go there all week and being our last day we finally made it to one. We (Miranda) spent a tone of money, but on useful stuff and some food for the road home.

After Target we decide to get some pizza for dinner as we did not want to cook on our last night, so we got Cici's (2 larges for $10) good pizza and headed back to the house. We all were looking forward to swimming as it was a super hot day (and the splash pad just does not do it for me) but it rained, I mean really rained on our last night at the house.

As we could not swim we decided to make one last trip to Walmart to get the kids some more souvenir and some other last minute stuff. No in Florida there are ponds every where, and each with the potential of containing one or more gator. In front of Walmart as you pull in there is a pond and as we passed this pond, I said to Miranda look at that and what was in the pond, not a gator but some ones car. The front end at least and it was a steep shore on the pond so there was no way they were getting out. If that was us I would have been running from the car (after getting the kids, well maybe :) ) in fear of gators.

After that we hit the Walmart and things really are very different down south, to this Walmart when you look up at the roof all you see are tons of camera, I think they are a little paranoid.

We spent another bunch of money on of all things Disney stuff ( as we were told it would be better then buying it at Disney) and headed back to the house. Now the kids have tons of stuff to remind them of our trip.

At the house the kids had some ice cream dot things and then off to bed, we had time to do some packing have some wine with the Manns and then off to bed as we had a long two days a head of us.

Day 7 done and no one wanted to leave the next day