Florida Vacation 2014

At Christmas, my parents surprised all the grandkids with an invite to go to Legoland in June. They were all so excited, and we counted the days down this winter to Florida.  I can distinctly remember counting, and we had 140 days to go.  So we were so excited when June 8 finally arrived.  Turns out that we had to first go to Raleigh, NC for Jeremy to train some folks at the plant there on Monday, June 9th.  We left early Sunday morning, and the kids did so great in the car.  It took us about 10 hours with stops to get to Raleigh.  They traveled amazingly well!

Woohoo!  My first US road trip!

Traveling in style:  neck pillows, blankets and
ear phones for the movies!

While Daddy was at the plant on Monday, I decided to take the kids to the Raleigh Natural History Museum in downtown.  This place was amazing and free!  We could have spent several days in there. What a treasure this museum is to folks who live there or want to visit.

Gigantic earth globe outside the museum.

We accidentally went in the back of the museum, going through a more advanced area for older kids.  But we still found lots to look at and discover.  This area had lots of smaller fish tanks, large whale skeletons, a submarine you could sit in and watch a show, and some other areas.  Luckily, a volunteer showed us the way to the old part of the museum that is more little kid friendly!

 

We made our way to the older section, and I was completely blown away by the quality of the exhibits. Not only were they beautiful to look at, but represented different parts of the ecosystems found through out NC.

Ava by a turtle tank that was built into a woodlands scene

After exploring the 2nd floor exhibits, we found a children's area that was incredible.  We should have spent more time here, but left to attend a children's hour show.  There was so much to do in this room, we barely scratched the surface.  Some of our favorite things were:

A touch and feel area that had lots of different things like a shark jaw, large coral, animal hides, rocks, and much more.

In another corner of the room, they had this cool microscope hooked up to a monitor.  They had lots of different slides the children could look at or put their own skin under the microscope!

Here Evan is using a balance to find equal weights of items.

Behind Evan there was a hollowed out tree with lots of puppets to play with or costumes in another corner.  Trevor cracked us up playing with these antlers!

Ava playing with a Bat puppet

While in this children's room, we watched bees come in through a small tube into a glass covered hive. We could watch them make comb and honey!  We also looked at and touched black beetles in a large plastic container that were hard at work decomposing a piece of wood.

At 11:30, we headed to the children's naturalist hour to hear a story and hopefully get to see some animals.  She read a book about animals and their different types of exteriors.  Then she brought out some friends!  We touched a skink, a rabbit, a dove, and a chinchilla.  By the end, everyone was quite hungry.  So rather than eat at the museum, we grabbed a map and walked a few blocks to Subway! Luckily, some kind policeman on bikes helped us find it.

After lunch, we headed back to the museum to finish areas we hadn't seen yet which included dinosaurs!  First we checkout some exhibits on the main floor.  They had an amazing NC seaside ecosystem exhibit.

Giant Shark mouth

We tried to hit the children's room one more time, but they were at capacity.  So we decided to head out and find a local park I had heard about called Pullen Park.  It is the oldest public park in Raleigh.