I could call this post There’s Too Much to Do in Tampa So Don’t Even Bother Going There Or You’ll Be Disappointed in All the Stuff You Didn’t Do, but that title was too long.
Our family took the long holiday weekend to travel to Tampa anyway. Why? No reason. I mean, we couldn’t find a good reason not to.
Mostly it’s because my husband had to pick up some equipment on the other side of the state. So we kinda had to. Even though it meant we were too early for the Gasparilla Pirate Festival.
Oddly, my three-year old has become obsessed with penguins, and he forces me to say good morning and good night to his plush penguin family every day. So we had to visit the Florida Aquarium to see the Penguin Promenade.
And Mr. Penguin got to meet Sandy, a resident African black-footed penguin.
(Did you know of the eighteen species of penguins in the world, most do not live in cold climates? And only one lives in Antarctica year-round, the emperor penguin. Put that down for #omgfacts in Twitter.)
But the aquarium was not just about penguins. No, it had other birds, too. Oh, and of course some fish and other sea creatures.
There is a fantastic play area that the Man-cub didn’t want to leave. But I maybe sorta bribed him with a train ride at Busch Gardens for the following day, and he finally tore himself away.
My husband and I thought the Florida Aquarium was pretty much perfect, and I really wish I could just pick it up and move it here so I could visit it every day. Or at least every week.
So, yes, the next day we visited Busch Gardens. The weather was perfect. I hadn’t been there since high school, so a lot had changed. I certainly don’t remember a train.
But of course, in high school I’m sure my sights were set on all the roller coasters there. The Man-cub wanted to ride one (that’s my boy—my husband doesn’t do coasters), but he was too short.
