Great Explorations

Like the awesomest place ever! Someone asked me how I find these places. I took a tip from the Travel Channel...ask the locals. One morning on our mini-vacation I sat and chatted with a semi-local. We were thinking about going to Mosi in Tampa. It sounded interesting enough, but she said no way. You'd be better off paying a few extra bucks and going to Bush Gardens. She said it was very expensive and required a lot of reading and there were always tons and tons of people! She suggested this place called Great Explorations. Seriously, where has this place been all of Ella's life!!! It was totally awesome. Binyam and I were slightly bored out of our gourd but Ella was in a state of perpetual elation! The place was pretty cool!
They had a mini-Publix. Complete with working checkout counter including a real beeping scanner. Kids just took their rightful spot and did the job!!!!!
Here she is checking out Binyam. It was quite amazing too how the place never really became a supreme mess. Usually the parents were hovering somewhere near the checkout counter and returned everything where it belonged and the play went on uninterrupted!!!!!!!!!!!
Ella was into the shopping. They had this little round bin full of fruits and vegetables. They did look really real but they were fake-o!
All the boxes on the Publix kids shelves were empty Publix generic brand boxes. She is standing here by the cereals and mac and cheese. yummie!Getting Mommy some ice cream....to the right, there must have been a hundred empty sour cream, and yogert containers. They had empty milk jugs, pop bottles, shampoo bottles, pet litter containers...you name it! It was realy neat. They even had Publix aprons which Ella was just too busy to be bothered with.
This was really neat, made for a wierd picture, but neat none the same! This area of the museum was all about water safety. Ella has on her life jacket on the boat. The boat is situated on a green screen. Then there were two TV's one in front of the boat that the kids were looking at and one out of the little area for the parents to see. The boat was then put into the Finding Nemo movie. Particularily the scene with the sharks. I took a picture of the kids in the movie but I guess the flash drown out movie scene but you can make it out a bit. The whole thing was just a cool concept.

This was a cafeteria. They had trays for the kids with instruction on how to build a healthy meal. Then they had bins set up with plastic items from all the food groups the kids could choose from then sit down in the cafeteria and "eat".
Here and there they had science type stuff. This is a ball drop/maze thing. The whole theme in this area was oranges. You could take the orange and watch it drop down or put several oranges and watch them all roll on down, there were little brushes which slowed the oranges down a bit and Ella was totally into watching them roll on down. In the same area they had a tube which sucked the oranges into a maze where they traveled over your head and all over the area!

I actually still have a quite a few more little areas that I couldn't fit all on this post so more to follow......