Alligator Farm

After an activity-filled two weeks of traveling and celebrating Christmas with family, I will be playing catch-up on the blog for a little while :)

On Thursday, Dec 16, we piled into our packed-to-the-hilt SUV and started off for the Red Roof Inn in Valdosta, Georgia.  (During our five trips to Florida in the past two years, we have learned that breaking the trip down into two days makes it easier on all of us.)  We got to the hotel a little before eleven, transferred the sleeping kids, and enjoyed a pretty good night's sleep.  The good-sized king bedroom & bath were definitely not bad for the $42 we paid.  After a rather lame but still filling continental breakfast, we were back on the road before 10:00 am.  After hearing that most of the family wouldn't be off work until after 5:00ish that day, Marcus made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take I-10 toward St. Augustine for some sight-seeing instead of taking our usual route through Gainesville & Orlando.

We arrived in St. Augustine around 12:30 and parked near the Castillo De San Marcos so we could enjoy some strolling.  Cheap as always, we told the boys we would only pay to go inside one thing: either the castle or the Alligator Farm.  They chose the Alligator Farm, so we just walked around the castle and saw what we could see from the outside.  Then, we crossed the street and spent some time exploring historic St. Augustine, something that could have taken up the whole afternoon (especially if we hadn't had the kids along).  We ate lunch at a quaint little bar with a live guitarist for entertainment.

The kids were very good all the time we were eating and walking around, so we were happy to reward them with a trip to the nearby Alligator Farm.  Marcus and I had visited the alligator farm more than seven years earlier, but we were impressed by all the additions since then.  The place is more like a zoo now, in addition to being an alligator hatchery.  We saw all kinds of exotic and local birds, monkeys, a komodo dragon, as well as hundreds of alligators and crocodiles, including a couple of albinos and the farm's largest alligator, Maximo.  They have even added a mulched play area, which our kids throughly enjoyed after so many hours in the car.

The grand finale of the afternoon was watching the feeding of the big gators in the largest swamp area of the park.  We saw this seven years ago, and it was just as impressive this time as we remembered it being then.  More than 300 alligators crawling over each other in the water vying for handfuls of dead rats tossed out by zookeepers is really something to see.  When we were all alligatored-out, we piled back in the car and set off on the last 2-hour leg of our journey to Mimi's house.

More about our Christmas in Florida next time :)

The feeding of the big gators in the swamp.

The boys pretending to be eaten by a preserved alligator on display.

Ethan dropping food into the juvenile alligator habitat.

The boys enjoying the play area.