Our Butterfly Rainforest Adventure

It all began with me joining RedGage a couple of months ago. I started earning money immediately just by uploading some of my content, granted it is not making me rich, but it did give me the extra cash for this little trip and it is fun.

Are you wondering what RedGage is?

Well, RedGage is a website that pays you for the content you create. It gives you the power to share your blogs, pictures, videos, documents, and links all in one convenient place. What I love about it is that it is easy, not work at all, and is actually a lot of fun meeting people and seeing what they have to share.

I was so excited to have made money here from the moment I joined the site and then I won one of the daily contests. WOO HOO!

I received my RedGage visa card with my first earnings just a couple of weeks ago and I really wanted to do something special with it.

Spending the day with my grandkids is always special to me and I kept hearing advertisements on the radio about The Butterfly Rainforest exhibit at The Florida Museum of Natural History. What a perfect combination.

Alyssa loves butterflies, her bedroom is decorated in butterflies, she is always watching them in the garden, and she even has a pair of wings that she wears and flies through the house. So that is how this little trip came about.

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The Butterfly Rain Forest is truly a unique experience. It is housed in a huge screened in enclosure that supports hundreds of butterflies from around the world. As you walk into the exhibit you feel as if you are walking into another world with all of the lush tropical plants, waterfalls, and streams.
Looking up is indeed a special treat as you can see hundreds of butterflies fluttering around.

We took our time through the exhibit, taking photos, and at times just sitting on benches observing. I brought my camera to get plenty of photos. It was a good thing that I brought my extra one as Alyssa always wants to do whatever Grandma does and she so wanted to photograph butterflies.
Grandma fixed her up and let her take photos of whatever she wanted. I had no idea she would love it so much or take such great photos, she is only 4, but what a pro. Look at her concentration.

I thought I would come away with tons of great photos, but the butterflies thought different. I really had a hard time snapping the camera fast enough to catch them. Now to my amazement they just seemed to pose for Alyssa and would let her come right up to them. This is one of her photos on the left. The orange butterfly in the intro photo at the very top of this page is hers also.

I told you Alyssa loves butterflies but I believe the butterflies love Alyssa also. The way that they would fly around and pose for her was wonderful, but one special butterfly decided it wanted to be even closer.

It landed on Alyssa's hand and really did not want to let go of her. This just topped her day. It was so precious how gentle she was and the way that she was talking to it.

How Sweet is that?

The amazing butterfly exhibit was so much fun and educational. It is basically an interactive maze with puzzles, games, climb-on play stations and other great activities for the entire family.

We began our adventure being morphed into larvae, as we worked our way through the maze, we learned how caterpillars move, what they eat, and so on until we eventually flew out of the maze on "The Monarch Monorail" as beautiful Monarch Butterflies.



We stayed butterflies for the rest of the day, fluttering our wings through the other exhibits in the museum with onlookers chuckling. Our names were now Grandma Butterfly, Mommy Butterfly, and Alyssa Butterfly.

The day before our trip Alyssa and I went to The Butterfly Rainforest's website to see what we could learn.
We found a Butterfly Discovery Game in which Alyssa discovered a new species of butterflies. The game then let her make and print her butterfly. She brought that picture along so that she could find that butterfly and get a photo of it.

We saw many beautiful blue butterflies, but no matter how hard we tried we just could not get a photo. We spent a couple of hours total in the exhibit to no avail. By this time is was quite hot so we decided to leave. Right before we got to the door a blue butterfly landed on a plant right next to us and just laid there with it's wings wide open. We could not believe it, and what a perfect ending.

We ended up spending the entire day at the museum and as you can see created some great memories. The Florida Museum of Natural History offers much more and we did manage to visit a couple of other exhibits. We are already planning a day to go back as we did not even scratch the surface of what you can do and learn there.

Of course we ended up in the butterfly gift shop. If you are or know someone who is a butterfly collector, this is the place to go. Alyssa bought this pretty pink butterfly to hang in her room.

Alyssa and I have been planning a butterfly-fairy garden. We were so lucky that the day that we visited the museum was having a plant sale. We were able to bring two pretty plants home to start our garden.