Gatorland

Our first park/attraction on this vacation was none other than Gatorland, the alligator capital of the world. The giant gator mouth is at the entrance to the park and makes for a great family portrait.

This guy is just plain dumb. He is holding half of a chicken and dangling it and his body over water filled with alligators. Now I know this is part of the attraction, but be careful.

We were able to touch a few of the alligators. To my surprise their body was not rough like I imagined. It was somewhat soft although it did feel a bit weird.

This was a white alligator not a albino one.
It is very rare and there are only about 14 in existence.

The best part about this alligator according to Trevor and I are its very blue eyes.

Just thought this bird looked cool so I grabbed a picture to share with you.

I swear it looks like the alligator is smiling at me. Maybe it is hoping I will fall into the water so it can have a little (okay big) snack.

Sean feeding the birds. We have a tremendous amount of pictures with blurry birds because they flew in and out so fast, but this one turned out pretty good.

I can't believe we captured this. It looks like Hayley is ever so gently giving the bird one morsel of food, but in reality this is the last piece left over after they attacked her hand and ate all the food. they flew to her hand, took food and flew away so fast.

Trevor was not so keen about feeding the birds, but he was really enjoying feeding the goats.

This is the observation tower for the breeding marsh. According to the sign near the tower the marsh has about 100 female and 30 male gators in it. There is also a raised wooden walkway so you can get a closer look at the gators.

This was taken from the 2nd story of the tower. How huge.

Just a few of the alligators we were able to see from the Observation Tower.

Trevor is coming up from the bottom level and I am standing at the top. Pretty cool view down the stairs. Under the tower is a holding pond for fish. Not exactly sure why, but we think it is food for the gators.

In honour of our British Family, who share the name Peacock, we took these beautiful pictures. I had never seen a peacock up close and thought the face was just amazing, not to mention their tail feathers.

This was a great show to watch. The trainer chose a young boy from the audience and had him pick the alligator the trainer was to wrestle.

Here he is showing the audience that you can poke an alligator in the eyes and it won't hurt them at all. Not sure I would try this myself, but good piece of information to know. The alligator pulls his eyes inside his head when danger (fingers, branches) are approaching.

He was showing us that the bottom jaw is actually the one with all the power. If you can hold the bottom jaw in then the gator has trouble opening his mouth. Again, not gonna try this at home.

After the show was over they got another alligator out of the water and allowed people to sit on its back and get there picture taken. We had 9 people with us ranging from 5 to 61 and it was 5 -year old Brave Little Hayley who jumped at the chance. They rest of us just stood behind the fence watching and taking pictures.

The mouth of the alligator was taped, but the trainer is telling Hayley where she can put her feet so she won't upset the alligator.

Once in position the trainer backed away from Hayley and the picture was taken. I love that you can see her pink nail polish on her fingers as she holds the alligators mouth.

Next it was time for walk through the Florida Swamp.

Papa Bear, Grammy, Sean and the kids enjoying their swamp walk. The whole swamp area had this raised wooden walkway. It brought you into the swamp without getting you wet.

All throughout the swamp area were signs talking about different plant life and what things you would encounter in a swamp.

At one point there was a huge tree that had been knocked down from the hurricane that came through Florida. It went right over the walkway.

I wanted to get a close up of the eye and guess I did just that.

Here is that same alligator's back.

Yikes! How would you like to be chased by this one.

Trevor trying to save Hayley from the giant fake alligator. What a nice brother.

This was one of many tiny alligator we saw at Gatorland. If I am doing my math right, this one is about 40 inches long. That is small compared to one Hayley sat on which was about twice as big if not bigger.