April 23rd.

April 23rd, 2007

Today we slept in a bit. I got up about 730am and the rest of the troop around 8am. We left and had breakfast at IHOP (International House of Pancakes). What’s a trip to the USA without a visit to the IHOP? We all had bacon and scrambled eggs, except Keturah who had stuffed French toast. It was stuffed with banana cream and topped with bananas and walnuts and caramel sauce. It looked very sweet! She has been eating a lot of sweet stuff for breakfast, because she doesn’t like most eggs or breakfast meat. She’ll sometimes eat hashbrowns, but that’s about it for breakfast foods. She does like boiled eggs, but only sometimes! SIGH.

We then stopped at Walmart SuperCentre, about twice the size of the Walmart in Kingston. It was humongous. Kevin bought some videotapes and I bought some earphones for my iPod, as I lost one of the earpieces for mine and I was using an old pair of Brooke’s and they wouldn’t stay in my ears!

We then headed to Gatorland Zoo. Kevin and I had been here about 20 years ago on our last visit to Florida. We heard they had a fire last fall and so they are lucky to even be open.

They have a whole bunch of alligators and crocodiles along with other animals as well. Kevin thought we’d be there a couple of hours, but we ended up being there almost 5 hours.

What we did:

Saw the gator jumparoo show, where they dangle raw chicken above the water to entice the gators to jump out of the water for it. Not all that exciting to tell you the truth!

WE then walked around and looked at all the different sizes of gators. The girls fed the fish in the ponds…I guess we have to fatten them up for the gators who were in the same pond.

We viewed a lot of other animals such as tortoises, snakes, birds, iguanas, goats, deers, llamas, turkeys and flamingos.

We then took a train ride around the property. It was very hot today in the sun. The weather channel said it was going to be 80, but it felt a lot hotter than that today.

We walked through the woods and viewed some crocodiles from around the world. We also walked through the swamp walk and saw a few lizards..the ones that are all over Florida! We didn’t see anything else. We saw some turtles just before the swamp walk and they were great big snapping turtles. I was throwing ice cubes in the water to tease the fish, who thought it was food and tried to eat them.

We then went to the breeding marsh, which has 3 stories that you can check out the females to see if any are nesting. There was one actually looked like she was guarding a nest, but we didn’t see any eggs. They did have some babies in the incubator…they were so cute…about 8 inches long maybe…

We also saw a lot of birds along the trail by the water. Quite a few of them also had babies in their nests and I tried to take a lot of pictures…when don’t I?

We then watched a show called Upclose Encounters, where you could find out about other animals. They had a tarantula, a pygmy rattlesnake, a diamond back rattlesnake and an albino python. They then let you hold either a snake or a lizard for $5.00, so Kevin got his picture taken with a lizard. Pretty cool!

We then left after that and went to Ponderosa for supper. Kevin and I both had a steak dinner. It was pretty good. Brooke had grilled chicken and Keturah just had the buffet. All was very good and we were very hungry since we didn’t have any lunch.

We came back to the hotel and Kevin and the girls went swimming for awhile and then into the hot tub. I just relaxed in the shade and listened to my iPod.

We then went over about a block away from our hotel to a place called Old Towne. It is an amusement park with stores, services, dining places and bars. Kevin and I had drinks. He had a margarita and I had a strawberry daiquiri (for Merle of course!). It tasted like another (and another)!

The kids rode some rides, we all rode on the go karts and we checked out a few stores. There was a t-shirt store that we went in and had a few laughs, reading the various shirts.

We just got home a few minutes ago and we are all tired out again! I’m sure we can catch up on our sleep when we get home!! Let’s hope so!

Well, we hope to go to Busch Gardens tomorrow and maybe the beach the day after that and then on Thursday we make our trek home…We’ll be sad to head home after having so much fun here!


More later...