FLORIDA

Tony was in Australia for a month, so I took the girls to Florida for a very long weekend in the middle of his trip.   One day it was pretty cold, so we went to a fun place called Great Explorations.  It's a children's museum of sorts.  I like it a lot because it's well laid out and there's only one main door (it's really easy to keep track of your kids unlike the one in Houston).  Here's the pizza room...

And the little pulley chair.  Anna played on this a LOT!!  And because Emma follows her sister around a lot, she played on it a lot too.

They had a litle exhibit with a snake, tarantula and some other critter I don't remember.  Anna was fascinated!

At the fire truck...

And the news room.

On the first day there, we went to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, home of Winter the dolphin, made famous by the Dolphin Tale movie.  (For some reason when I downloaded the museum pictures were first).  Anyway, here's the rescue truck.  The boys are my nephews Preston and Brett.  My girls LOVE them!

We took a little trolley to a little museum type exhibit for the Dolphin Tale movie.  It had lots of props and recreated movie scenes set up with lots of movie trivia info displayed everywhere.  It was very interesting.

And there was a little play area with this fun photo op...

There's winter in her tank.  You can see where her tail is missing.

Emma excited to be watching Winter in her tank.

There was a little show with Winter and her tankmate Panama.

My mom and sister.

There's Winter!

It was a little chilly on the upper deck for another dolphin show.

One afternoon I took the girls to the beach.  It was still pretty cold, but they rolled up their pants and waded anyway.

They used these nets to catch fish, which was really just sea weed.  I love the imagination of little kids!!

Anna caught a lot of "fish"!

The next day, we went to Busch Gardens.  It is a really cool themed amusement park/zooish type place.

The girls loved this little car ride.

We spent most of our time in the Elmo-themed kid section.

That's Emma.  It was hard to get a good picture. :(

In the car again...

There was water stuff there too, but it wasn't really warm enough to spend the whole day wet.  I had told the girls they could get wet at the end, which they complained about.  Then we had dinner by this giant grown up roller coaster that went through water.  They kept watching it hoping to get wet.  Then they managed to get totally dumped on.  They weren't too happy about it, because, of course, they were cold.  Go figure - mom was right!!

 They dried up a little walking over the to bumper cars, which was really fun.  Then we took a train ride through the animal reserve and saw lots of cool wild animals, which I didn't take any pictures of.

 I tried to get them to the other kiddie area of the park before it closed, but we got sidtracked by these hippo statues.  They spent about 20 minutes playing here.

 I got them to go check out the elephants before the park closed.  You can't see in the picture, but there was a trainer playing with the elephant with a roll of toilet paper.  It was pretty cute.  I'm not a big fan of zoos because the small spaces make me sad, but this place was really cool.  The elephant's home was more than twice the size of where the elephants live at the Houston zoo.  Anna was fascinated. 

 Our last day was the hottest, and we headed back to the beach.  The girls had lots of fun, but they still only just waded in the water, which was still really cold.

Thanks for a really great trip Gram!!!