There are about five different areas in there to explore, and even spending 2 hours we did not spend anywhere near all the time we could have.
First there's a visitor's center with three areas:
Princess exiting the cave
I love the mural in the background
Superman using his "spyglass."
1. a recreation of the natural habitat with a cave to walk into and rocks to climb on and a tree that you can lift up pieces and see what's inside. My kids have easily spent an hour there enacting different adventures they've come up with. It's really hilarious.
Princess getting an artifact to explore
Batman looking at his item
2. an explore nature center, you can pull cleaned animal bones, rocks, various other artifacts off shelves and look at them under big microscopes and feel them. Also you can bring in artifacts to be examined and earn points to take home some of the stuff they have on exhibit.
3. An exploratory center with different animal skins, some animal bones (including a huge cow bone that my kids insist is a dinosaur bone), antlers, and turtle shell. There's a tripod magnifying glass that you can put stuff under and examine it.
Exploring the creepy crawlies, and doing a very good job not being loud
It is hard to get good pictures of your kids looking at animals. It really is. There's lots of back of the head shots
As I'm sure you can guess, this is "Baby Jaguar."
This is the first time we actually looked at the animals they have here. They're all native animals that have been rescued, so there's quite a few birds and coyotes and such. There's also the world's cutest racoon that used to be a pet, and now loves to play games with the visitors. They had so much fun talking about the different animals.
Superman is on the left (I put these labels in here because otherwise in 2 weeks I'm going to look at this picture and have no idea which child is which, it's really sad)
Princess happily using her pink shovel
There's a dino dig site. They've made cast replicas of some dinosaur bones found in the area and you can dig it out of the sand and pebbles. There's a nice supply of shovels to be used. My kids love this area. Of course we did this backwards, we should have gone here first and then the water, but we just did the water twice.
The excitement of this came when Princess discovered that if she let her shoes go in the water they floated down stream. "Uh oh! Wheee!"
Princess noticed Miss Tami holding her skirt out of the water, so she had to do the same thing. So very cute.
The water area is really just a shallow stream that you can walk through and jump from rock to rock. At it's deepest it get to about knee level on my 2 year old. It's perfect.
Okay and for two of my favorite non-kid pictures:
Now you see me
Now you don't
The bob white quail came up just as I took the second picture, and it was just too cool. It's even cooler when you're tabbing between the two on my camera.
