On the evening of Day 1, my son and I went around and around about how to best spend Days 2 and 3. He was in favor of going to Busch Gardens in Tampa; I thought that would be too tiring and expensive – I preferred Homasassa Springs Wildlife State Park which I thought would be more low-key. But both were over an hour away so we finally compromised on Silver Springs State Park which was only a 15-minute drive.
I was a bit disappointed. The main attraction of the park is the glass-bottomed boats (and, in fact, the 1966 movie The Glass Bottom Boat was filmed here). The 30-minute tour was interesting but the rest of the park was basically walking trails. You can rent kayaks here and that might have been nice, but we didn’t opt for that as none of us had even kayaked before. Most surprising was that the shops were all closed for renovation and the only food in the park was a lonely food truck.
Well, we wanted low-key.
Because we ate little (me) or nothing (Tony and Lili) at the park, we dined out at Texas Roadhouse. The meal was forgettable except for the Bread Incident. One of the reasons we went to Texas Roadhouse was that Lili really likes their bread. But on this occasion she broke a biscuit, smelled it and tossed it back. She said it “smelled like alcohol”. Now you can ask how a 15-year-old can identify the smell of alcohol, but we won’t go there. Both Tony and I smelled the roll and agreed that it did smell like alcohol. I then ate some of it and it tasted fine, but Tony complained to the waitress (who also concurred on the alcohol smell). She went to the kitchen and was told that that is the smell of the yeast.
Plausible since the roll tasted fine.
Day 3 was a do-nothing day. Lili spent the day playing video games with remote friends and, sometimes, with her father. I blogged and read. I did sneak out once to find the resident gopher tortoise sunning himself.