Lowry Park Zoo, Tampa Florida - - Finally! And it was well worth the wait. According to the brochure it was voted America’s #1 Zoo. And it sure is! Sorry, Toledo Zoo, we now have a new favorite zoo. But, thanks to my Toledo Zoo Membership we did not have to pay the $17 per senior person to get in! Everything in the park was expensive, even the new patch for my jacket.
Lots of babies- from the twin white tiger cubs who were crawling and falling all over their poor mother, the baby orangutan hanging just within reach of it’s red haired momma, the baby baboon who was much cuter than it’s blue bottomed papa, and the biggest baby – the very thirsty African Elephant! By far the most babies we’ve seen in any zoo! There were Kangaroos in a walkabout, lots and lots of very unusual and very colorful birds in several different domed aviaries, 2 white alligators, a beautiful velvet coated Okapi (a big red antelope type with black and white stripes on its back legs), up close Giraffes- thanks to a high feeding platform, a strange looking red warthog creature from Asia, a hands-on experience with Cow Nosed Stingrays (Oh, so soft!) and of course Manatees! Lowry Zoo is the biggest Manatee hospital/rehab facility in Florida where injured Manatees are brought in, nursed back to health and then released back to the wild if possible. Quite informative!
After H changed his shoes to ease the pain on his new set of blisters, we attempted to go visit the RV Show at the Florida State Fairgrounds. The venue turned out to be way bigger than our tired legs were ready to endure and - - neither of us wanted to pay $5 to park and then yet another $7 for each of us to enter what should have been a free sales pitch for the vast multitude of RV’s and all the new and improved equipment for them.
On our way back south to our “motel” we found the turnoff road for the power plant in Apollo Beach. The folks at the power plant have built and maintained a really neat observation park to view and learn about manatees. The plant itself sits on the north side of a large creek/canal where the manatees come to get warm because of the hot water coming from the plant’s water discharge. The thermometer on the south side of the canal by the boardwalk registered 80 degrees. In just the area at the end of the canal we counted over 50 manatees and there were many more out where the water was being poured back into the canal.
