Butterfly Rainforest

Madison got to meet some butterflies today - face to face!  We left Nana and Ba-Ba's house this morning, but weren't quite ready to go directly home just yet.  That's why we dropped by the Butterfly Rainforest, a part of a museum located in Gainesville, Florida.  The museum there is pretty big, but it is the butterflies that are the real draw.

And there were thousands of butterflies there.  Seriously, they flittered around the butterfly rainforest, falling all around like snow, floating all around.  It was very beautiful, set in a rain forest with streams and tropical plants and a path wandering all throughout.

And the butterflies kept landing on Madison too.  This one was a purple one that landed on her bow, which made it look just like some sort of hair decoration.  Madison was cracking up each time the butterfly landed on her, or anyone else.  Which was a lot.  She had a great time!

The butterflies, by the way, were native to Southeast Asia - a theme of this year's presentation.  Something tells me this won't be our last visit either.  We could have stayed at this museum a lot longer.  There were plenty of other things to see, lots of exhibits about the native Indians that lived in Florida first, as well as all sorts of geological samples, and lots of upright skeletons of ancient mammals.  No dinosaurs though, but the museum made up for this with wooly mammoths and giant birds.

We stayed a lot later than we planned.  And we still needed to get home!  So from Gainesville, Florida to Gainesville, Georgia we drove.  It was a pretty smooth drive this time - even in Henry County.  This is on account of our leaving Florida so late.  We got home about 8:00, having been gone seven days - longer than any vacation in recent history.  What helped the drive was our listening to "Peter and the Star Catchers," on the way back.  It took much of the drive down, and much of the drive back to hear the entire story. But we enjoyed it.  Daddy read the book before, but it was all new to Mommy, who loved it.  And to get into things, Madison watched "Peter Pan" and "Return to Neverland" in the back seat.  She brought those movies earlier, with no idea of our plans to listen to this book.  It was sort of a Neverland theme all the way home.

We had a couple stops at rest areas and a nasty McDonald's on Indian Trail Road.  We won't go into details on that, as it would gross you out.  But we did get home safely, and we thanked God for the amazing vacation we had.  Such favor!  Such a blessing!

And such fatigue.  Seriously, we're all a bit worn out.  So like butterflies, our eyes are fluttering as we walk up the stairs and head to our beds - the first time we've seen them in a week.  We're all ready for a good long nap!