We've reached Sunday 11 July 1993 in our trek through the American holiday and this particular day we left Orlando for a look at Busch Gardens near Tampa.
As we left the hotel entrance there was a distant roaring sound and when I looked up, it turned out to be the burners of a few early morning hot air balloons.
Busch Gardens was way out on the west coast of the Florida peninsula, close to the city of Tampa. It was part theme park and part zoo with enough space to have some really great environments and an overhead monorail train so you could actually see the animals. One of the features of modern zoos is they create areas where the animals can feel safe and quiet but then of course, it's less good for the visitors because the animals can find spaces to hide away. The overhead monorail was quiet and unobtrusive and had the advantage of affording the occasional face-to-face with a giraffe!
There were supposed to be some white tigers, but I only managed to see the usual orange one.
There were a couple of roller coasters at Busch Gardens that I really loved. No doubt they are old hat now and there will be bigger and better coasters but at the time these were brilliant. I'd never ridden a coaster with a corkscrew loop before and Python had a double corkscrew that took you through 360 degrees twice in quick succession. That was pretty much all it did, but it was great all the same.
Plus I took the camcorder with me and sat in the front seat and I have a shaky black-and-white-cos-the shaking-affected-the-camera video record of the event.
I was going to do the same on the large four-abreast coaster Kumba. This was an awesome coaster, it did more aerobatics than the normal up and down with an occasional loop coaster. However the staff were adamant that my camcorder had to remain with them until I had got off the ride and I have to admit, it would have been very difficult not to bash myself in the face with it on that particular ride!.
Like Sea World the park was owned and operated by Anheuser Breweries so there was plenty of Budwesier beer to be had! It was another very hot day, but we went to see an ice skating show and it was brilliantly cool, even approaching shveringly cold, inside!
We had done the overhead monorail so it seemed only right that we should do the ground level railroad as well.
A fair number of large alligators came out of the water, tails thrashing about as they tried to driver their very heavy bodies up the raised bank before they feet could get a purchase. The turtle seemed to be taking its life in its hands as it shuffled across the nose of this alligator, but perhaps it was secure in the knowledge that it tasted bad... An excellent day. Even though Fran at one point was told by a woman "I'm going to hit you - you have a mosquito on your back!" There was then a hefty thump, enough to make Fran stagger! However she wasn't stung and didn't catch any grisly tropical disease so I suspect it may have been worth it!
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