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This is part 3 of a 5-part series, containing both photos and commentary. If you haven’t already, you should start with part 1 of the vacation recap.

Day 4

We drove 2 hours to the headquarters of Cru, on the east side of Orlando. We caught the 10:30 tour of the Jesus Film project. The tour tells people about the film and demonstrates how it is translated. The 2-year-old did not care for it at all, and the 4-year-old didn’t last long either. I’d say 1st grade on up for this.

They have displays of a (simulated) hut that a field worker might use:

They have displays of where and how translations have been accomplished:

Here’s the building, which I guess is headquarters:

It was a little hard to find, but only for that morning that we were trying to find it. That’s because they were updating the sign. We saw the new sign on our way out, but on our way in the sign wasn’t there so we missed the driveway the first time.

It is a nice campus – nice architecture, nice grounds, nice people. We were visiting some friends who work there, so we got an additional tour after the film tour.

We had taken a toll road to get there, so I thought I would try a different road for leaving. I did, but it turned out to be a toll road too. There’s no avoiding it around there.

Our next destination (after lunch at Quizno’s) was Gatorland:

There were alligators:

and birds:

and more gators:

There were also snakes, spiders, petting-farm animals, and more, but I don’t have good photos of all of those.

We saw all the displays and stuff, then we took the trail around back to see more gator habitats. They had a train available, but we skipped that.

There was also a swamp walk, which we weren’t intending on doing, but the boys liked it.

They also let you take a zip line over several of the swamps, for a small fee of course. We declined that invitation, but here is a photo of one of the zip line towers, as seen from across the swamp water.

And we caught the gator wrestling show. This one was better than the Jumparoo. Maybe because we could sit for this one. The alligator was reluctant to be wrestled. Once the guy grabbed his tail and started pulling, the gator tried digging his claws in to the sand to avoid being wrestled, but to no avail. The wrestler quickly sat on the gator and grabbed his closed mouth. The wrestlee couldn’t do much after that.

They had a gator feeding show (the Jumparoo) at certain times, and we caught one of those (featuring Bubba and Cooter). But the gators in that pen are used to being fed, so they don’t try very hard to get the food. What was more interesting was when we happened to walk by when a worker was feeding another pool of gators. The feeding wasn’t a show, it was just some guy throwing meat to alligators. These gators were smaller – about 2-4 feet long – whereas the gators in the show were 6-8 feet long. But they were more energetic. The only problem was that the guy was actually throwing the meat. Raw meat. Dripping raw meat. So when he started his wind-up, unobservant passers-by could get splattered with who-knows-what. I kept my kids back from the feeder and sent them past between throws.

We didn’t see or do everything at Gatorland, but we were done. Maybe the older two boys could have kept going, but Delta fell asleep and we wanted to get to the rental condo before dark. So we left, through the gift shop, of course. The kids could have stayed in the gift shop longer too. I should have bought myself a shirt there or something. Gamma got a backscratcher made out of a gator foot.

Then we drove to the rental condo, about a 20-minute drive. Toll road, of course. We stayed at Tuscana. We picked it because it would sleep 6 people. There are a lot of hotel options around Orlando, but most of them are setup for 2-4 people. We liked this place because it could hold us all (2 bedroom plus pull-out couch, 2 bath) and it had a kitchen and laundry. The laundry was important, because then we could pack only half the clothes we needed.

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My wife planned very well for the trip. In fact, she started packing over a week before we left. But this is how she did it – rather than give each person a suitcase, she had a small suitcase for each day. Since we were staying at 3 different hotels on the way down, it was very efficient. Stop at a hotel, and just pull out that hotel’s bag, rather than everyone’s bags. Then next morning, when we’re leaving the hotel, just one suitcase goes back in the van, and it is solely dirty laundry.

Ingenious, no?

Then we get to Tuscana and we can do all the laundry. Now all the suitcases are ready for the trip back. In reverse order, since each stop would get progressively colder instead of progressively warmer.

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