Birmingham's Lane Park

Birmingham Botanical Gardens half of Lane Park

For a big city botanical garden, we were very disappointed in this one, the grounds weren’t dirty but they weren’t clean either, there were a lot of weeds in with the flowers, and every employee had his own golf cart and they were all racing around the gardens so you got to choke on the exhaust fuels. They were suppose to have a great Japanese Garden, when we got to that part the main gate was blocked with a pickup truck making repairs and we had to walk around to a small gate in the back, it just wasn’t worth it. The three pictures are about the only nice looking areas that we found we won’t be back.

Birmingham Zoo half of Lane Park

Out one gate, cross the street and in another gate and you are at the zoo. It was pushing 90 and the humidity was about 95% and we were thinking about passing on the zoo but decided that we were already here so lets give it a little look. We were sure glad that we did, it was totally different from the gardens, we were wishing that we had skipped the gardens and spent all our time here.

When you enter the Zoo you are greeted by a bunch of squawking parrots that can be heard 100 feet away, I think that we may have caught part of the monarch butterfly migration because they were all over the park.

The Gorilla was just sitting there eating his broccoli and carrots, probably not a normal diet for a gorilla, but 4 years ago this guy had a pacemaker installed. From what I could get from the little film this was the first time that they have done this. He was just months from cashing it in when they installed it and as of the last test he’s doing great. He’s just stuck with fruits and veggies, as Cathy said the good news is you’re going to live a long life, the bad news is you’re still in a zoo.

The birds were the best, there were about 30 of them in a large room and they had little cups of food that if you held in your hand they would come feed, but if they liked you they would just land on you and lick you or peck at your ears.











After leaving the zoo we went to Dr Pepper Place, this is an old Dr Pepper syrup and bottling plant that closed years ago and has been converted to a bunch of yuppie type shops. Since Cathy is a Dr Pepper junkie I figured that she would like having lunch in the old plant. There is a little deli right in the middle of an antique shop that sits about 8 people, they had some great sandwiches and salads and besides it was the yuppie thing to do.

Mote Aquarium

The indoor aquarium is fairly large and has probably 50 different displays, everything from a 2-foot long lobster, without the butter, clown fish, coral reefs, to some great fossils.





From here we stepped outside and found Molly the Mollusk, a 27 foot-long giant squid, this one was found in New Zealand and had been preserved, this is the only place in the USA that you can see on of these on display, no one has ever seen a live giant squid in it's natural habitat. No pictures of it, it was too ugly. There is also a model of a 14.5-foot hammerhead shark that was caught 2006 (World record).


It was feeding time for the sharks so we climbed up to the top of the 135000 gallon tank to watch them, We were all ready for a Jimmy Buffet style "Feeding Frenzy", but instead all we got was the care takers putting cut up fish on the end of a pole and holding it in the water for the fish to take, except none of the fish appeared to be hungry. The tank itself held a variety of fish: nurse, bull, black-tips and sand sharks, grouper, tarpon, snook and redfish, makes you want to go back out to the car and get your fishing rod.

From here we had to leave and walk about a block down to their other building where they keep the sea turtles and manatee.


Hang Tough is a green sea turtle (vegetarian), he was brought to the Mote with several injuries which left him blind so now he just swims around in his tank, using his flippers as a white cane to keep from swimming into the wall. You can't touch them but you can get within a foot or so of them when they come to the side of the tank.


Shelley and Montego are their two loggerhead turtles; they were born in captivity and were part of a study in N. Carolina, when the study ended they were sent here since they could not be released into nature. There is also a few baby turtle ranging in length from 2-inches to about 6-inches.

Another favorite are the manatee's Hugh and Buffett, they were born at the Miami Seaquarium and transferred to the Mote in 1996, they are trained to participate in the scientists research so they can try and save more of the manatee out in the wild.
Most of the injured wildlife brought to the Mote are rehabilitated, fitted with sensors and returned to the wild were they can be located and studied. There is also a dolphin pool but they weren't very active while we were there.

The Sunken Gardens of St. Petersburg

It's a hot sunny day and we're right in the middle of all the snowbird traffic as they work their way into south central Florida and drive all of us EARLY snowbirds crazy, so it's time for a little escape from reality.
How do you do that, you drive to St Petersburg and find the Sunken Gardens, since we're members of the UM Botanical Gardens our cost is… freebee.




Sunken Gardens started out over a hundred years ago when a plumber named George Turner Sr. decided that he wanted his own botanical garden, so he bought a six-acre sinkhole that had a small lake in the middle and started working on it. He drained the lake and started planting a wide variety of plants, after a few years he opened a small nursery and started to sell some of the plants and fruits. When so many people wanted to walk through the garden he started charging a small fee. The garden continued to grow and during the 1930's it became one of the top roadside tourist attractions in Florida, showing people what the tropic Florida was really like.


By 1999 the garden had been neglected, over grown and run down when the City of St Petersburg purchased it and started to restore it to Mr. Turner's original idea of a tropical garden.

Once you enter the garden the sun disappears as you walk through tunnels formed by the heavy canopy of tropical growth, follow the trail and you will soon be walking through a bamboo forest, crossing steams on little arched bridges, spotting tropical birds and cascading waterfalls. Continue on viewing some of the 50,000 different varieties of plants, back to the butterfly garden and house were you can rest up and maybe have a butterfly or two join you on your shoulder, finish up at the cactus garden before you head back out into the real world of noise, traffic and confusion

If you didn't know better and just drove by this place you would think that it was just another restaurant on the main drag of St. Pete and not a place to wander and relax for an hour or two, right in the middle of a busy city.