Busch Gardens Tampa

After a week of family vacation in St. Augustine, Michael is now officially on his fifth grade trip. As part of that Mom bought tickets for him to go to Busch Gardens and said if I tagged along, she would get me a ticket too (I never got a fifth grade trip, but I got to go to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg with Andrew, too). We got a 2-day ticket for not much more than a single day ticket and it includes lunch both days. We went to the first day today by ourselves, but Mom and Don will join us tomorrow.

Busch Gardens has some of the best roller coasters in Florida, but I wasn’t sure how Michael would do on them. He said he would try out Cheetah Hunt first, their newest roller coaster. Since we got there right at the opening, there was only about a 5-minute wait. As he saw how high the track goes and how fast the cars flew by, he started getting a little nervous. We sat about halfway back so we couldn’t get the front row view of the drops and loops. Once we were in our seats and buckled in I asked him if he wanted to get off and he said yes. I tried to get the attention of an attendant, but they have a procedure they follow. Michael raised his hand to get off. Too late. He was very nervous, but during the ride he seemed pretty calm. After it was over, he said he wanted to go home immediately and never wanted to come back to Busch Gardens. I said we could take the cable car ride over the animal habitat to at least see some more of the park and again there was hardly any waiting. He resisted at first, but liked that ride. That took us to part of the park with a log flume ride, so we rode that. It was such a big hit we got back in line and rode it again. At some point we came across an area where one of the biggest roller coasters, Sheikra, causes a huge splash that soaks people standing nearby, so Michael stood there and got soaked a few times. He tried to get me to come over, but there was no way I was going to be soaking wet for the rest of the day.

lorikeetsWhile we were walking, we came across a bird enclosure where you could feed birds nectar, so we stopped in there, bought a tiny cup of nectar and the guides showed Michael how to stand so that the birds would feel comfortable landing on him and walking down his arm to the nectar he was holding. He had three birds on him at once. In the picture he is still soaking wet from Sheikra’s splashes.
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