April 28-29 – Tampa, FL – Lazydays RV Campground

After making our way up the gulf coast of Florida we arrived at Lazydays Campground in Tampa. Lazydays is the largest RV dealer in the world and their location in Tampa has Camping World, Cracker Barrell, Flying J and a huge campground, among other things, on site. The place was loaded with amenities, the price was right at $35/night and it was only 15 minutes to Busch Gardens. We all loved the awesome pool they had which was surrounded by an immense screened building that covered the whole pool area. Presumably this was all to keep the bugs away although there weren’t any to be found when we were there – I think they must have ALL migrated south to the Trail Lakes Campground (see the post for April 27^th).

We spent the next two days at Busch Gardens and the whole family had a blast. The park is a combination zoo and amusement park and both aspects of it were executed beautifully. The zoo contained a collection of animals that would equal or exceed that of the best municipal zoos in the country and the habitats were all world class. I was pretty surprised as I expected that the zoo would take a back seat to the rides. One of our favorite aspects of the park was the train ride through the savannah exhibit with giraffes, wildebeests, zebra and rhino among others. The gorilla, lion and flamingo exhibits were awesome as well. The zoo was nice but in our mind the main attraction here were the roller coasters. They had 6 major coasters that were all a blast. One of them took you upside down 7 times in the course of one ride. Another suspended the coaster for a few seconds at the top of a huge vertical drop. Their newest coaster – Cheetah Hunt – used a magnetic drive system to propel the coaster to 65 mph at the start of the ride – so cool. We did face one challenge in the park – all of the big coasters had height requirements. As it turned out Elizabeth, Zach and Eve all fell just shy of the mark on a few of the coasters. Not a problem – the next day instead of flip flops we shod the kids in tennis shoes complete with extra cushioning under the insoles in the shoes. When we got to the rides we also had them take off their socks and stuff them under their heels inside the shoes. Problem solved! This park takes their height restrictions pretty seriously – Zach actually got measured 4 times on one ride alone because the attendants didn’t think he looked tall enough to ride J All of us loved the rides and we were fortunate that one of our days in the park fell on a Monday which allowed us to ride our favorites several times in a row.

Cheetah Hunt