Barbara Manatee

Today was supposed to be the coldest day of the week, so I suggested to Brett, Cameron and Meg that we visit the manatees at Three Sisters Spring.  I realized that Cameron really wanted to sleep in after an exhausting weekend, but I also knew that the cold weather brought in a lot more manatees from the gulf. After checking their website and seeing that there were over 250 manatees in the Crystal River Spring, we decided to make the trip.

We left our home before 10 a.m. this morning with Cameron positive that there wouldn't be any manatees to see.  I tried to convince him that he was wrong as I had seen hundreds of them when Grandma, Grandpa and I visited the spring last January, but he wouldn't believe me until he saw it for himself.  There were very few people in the ticket office when we arrived.  I was happy to see that we would receive a nice discount from my national park membership.  I was also glad that there were areas by the springs to park, so we didn't have to take the shuttle bus.

Thankfully, Cameron was not disappointed as there were a lot of manatees in the springs today and we saw them swimming in the lagoon as soon as we stepped on to the boardwalk.  Brett, Cameron and Meg were surprised by how big they were.  Cameron saw several surface to breathe and realized why he thought that they were alligators when he and Nick went kayaking at Silver Springs last year.  We watched them for a while and then headed down the path toward the river.  There, we saw many more manatees huddling together.  After taking a few pictures, we walked over to the area that I called the parking lot as it looked to me like all of the manatees were parked in spots next to each other.  There were hundreds of them in the "parking lot."  It was a lot of fun watching them move around together.  We also saw dozens of kayakers trying to get a good view of them as well.  I was glad that we were on the boardwalk as I felt it was a lot easier to see them all from there.  We finished our time at Three Sister Springs walking on the dirt path looking at the manatees swimming in the channel by the docks.  Everyone agreed that it was a great reason to get up early this morning. On the way back to Ocala no one sang Barbara Manatee, but we definitely talked about the beloved Veggie Tales song and all of the manatees that we saw today. 

After stopping at home, Cameron and Meg decided that Panda Express sounded good for lunch. Brett said that he really wanted to go to Jaws.  Thankfully, they were close to each other, and we all enjoyed our food.  We spent the rest of the afternoon shopping at Paddock Mall and went to dinner at Hiatus tonight once Doug got back from work.  Afterward, we played a few games at home with Uncle Phil.  It was a busy first full day in Ocala, but a fun one at that.