Family weekend travel to Tampa

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 18 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.

Besides the 37 train rides we did, though, there was plenty to keep him entertained. He loved the three-story Jungala play area.



There was a lot more we could have seen if we hadn't spent so much time on the dern train, but we know we have to come back to Tampa because:

- Our Busch Gardens ticket lets us get in for free for the rest of the year.

- We have got to go back when Busch Gardens' Sesame Street Safari of Fun opens in March. (With a kiddie roller coaster, Air Grover! I know the Man-cub will want to ride again and again.)



- I never got to see the elephants, even though we did see lots of wildlife.





- We never got to ride the streetcar in downtown Tampa (which the Man-cub thinks is a train) or explore Ybor City.

- We didn't make it to MOSI.

- Or Lowry Park Zoo.

Also, there are some great natural areas nearby that we haven't been to in a while like Hillsborough River State Park (great for hiking and camping) and Upper Tampa Bay Park.

Traveling with the boys isn't as easy as the explorations my husband and I used to make when it was just the two of us. Even for weekend trips, we pack a lot of stuff and invariably forget something. But seeing our son pretend to be a hermit crab?



It's so worth it.