Is That An Alligator In Your Farm, Or Am I Just Crazy?

After lunch we drove towards St. Augustine and stopped at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and Zoological Park. This is the only place either in the U.S. or the world (it's like the fort information all over again) that has all 24 crocidilian species. And boy howdy do they ever...especially your standard alligator, they are everywhere. If you go to the concession stand for a snack, it's an alligator that will take your order and an alligator that will make your order. Everywhere I tell you.


We came in time for a feeding of the gators but they seemed, on the whole, pretty well stuffed. This gator just floated right in front of the woman speaking. She told us that it had lockjaw.



Okay, am I the only one that thinks this is hilarious..."Siamese crocodiles can be difficult to identify, looking exactly as you would expect a crocodile to appear".
In addition to gators and crocs there were birds and turtles and a smattering of monkeys and other reptiles.

So many alligators.


Migratory birds.
Spoonbill bird...it was pink, but not a flamingo!

For my mother this was a childhood dream come true. Having never made it to Florida as a child, she only had a vague notion of what the state was like as told to her by friends/cousins and one especially vivid Florida association was gator farms. While she has been to Florida before, this was my mother's first gator farm. I love writing gator farm.

Zoo, Puppets and Blue Eyes

On Friday I went to the Elmwood Zoo with J. and her two sons S. and N. You might recall them from my visit to Philadelphia. The reason we went there was to watch a purported puppet show. It turned out to be a lady with some stuffed animals singing very slightly altered versions of popular kids' songs. It seemed to keep the kids' attentions for the most part though S. certainly didn't want to stay for the whole thing...but then there was ice cream at the end of the puppet tunnel.



The ice cream in question was, well, pretty lame. It came from the zoo's little cafe. There were four possible flavors. I went with a flavor called something like 'celebratory sundae'. It was cookies and cream with peanutbutter. It took the team behind the counter an inordinately long time to scoop together our three cones. I mean a really, really unbelievably long time...and then the result was a sub-par scoop of ice cream. Really. I mean. Whatever.
S. liked his birthday cake flavored ice cream.

The zoo was in Norristown, a suburb of Philadelphia full of a large number of extremely unattractive and unfortunate looking people...or at least all the people we saw on the streets fit this description.