Spring Break :: Desitnation? Tampa, Florida

Earlier this year, we decided that we needed a trip for Spring Break.  It's our 15th anniversary on April 19th, and initially Ross and I thought it would be fun to take the kids to Puerto Vallarta, where we went on our honeymoon.  But, airfare was a little too steep, and the rush to get the kids passports a little too daunting so we gave up on Mexico for another day.

Instead, with the inspiration of Grandma Judy, we decided to head to Tampa, Florida to find some manatees, enjoy some sunshine, and spend some time far away from all our distractions.  Generally, when we travel, we pack our itinerary so full of activities that we are not only exhausted on the trip, but absolutely wasted when we get home and jump back into real life.  For this trip, we agreed to take a more relaxed approach and it was definitely the right decision.





The trip started with a red eye on Thursday night/Friday morning from Salt Lake to Tampa that left at 12:10 am.  We managed to get everyone through security awake and then Quinn fell asleep sitting at the gate waiting for the flight.   Ross carried him onto the plane, and he slept the entire flight, just flopping around every 20 minutes or so.  The rest of us?  Not so lucky and when we landed at 6:21 Tampa time (4:21 am our time) we were pretty tired.

Once we landed and got our bags, we each took turns changing in the bathroom into some more weather appropriate clothes and took an UBER to the Toyota dealership to rent our vacation mini van.




Then, we headed to the zoo.

The top priority of our trip was to find manatees.  We knew the zoo had a few and that you could see them swimming in the water - Quinn and I had done our research.  We toured the zoo and saw some animals we hadn't seen before - some howling monkeys, a Florida panther, pygmy hippo and baby and okapi.  Of course, we saved the manatee for last and of course, they were not at at the zoo.



The manatees had been moved to a new location because their enclosure is currently being remodeled.  I was steaming mad - mostly because this was our surefire sighting location.  But, like my mom would do, I asked some questions and found out where the manatees had been moved to (Homosassa Bay Nature Reserve) and kept that in the back of my head.





We finished at the zoo, jumped into our van and realized that yes, in the Florida heat and humidity (it was about 80 degrees out), the AC in the mini van was not working.  It was a pretty sweltering drive across the bay from Tampa to the town we were staying in, Safety Harbor, but our cute little airbnb was nice and cool when we arrived.

While the boys watched TV and I crashed out, Ross managed to find a close Toyota dealership to fix the van AC in just a couple of hours.  We had dinner, uber'd to the van, hit the grocery store, watched the sunset and called it a day.