For anyone sailing out of Cape Liberty to the Bahamas with Royal Caribbean, you know that first stop is probably going to be in Florida’s Port Canaveral. If you’ve been there more than once, you know that it is hard to find a good excursion to do, with many people opting to just stay on the boat for the day. Others brave and fight ½ of their shipmates to go to the Kennedy Space Center, but after that there really isn’t a bunch of good options through Royal Caribbean.
There are potential trips to one of the Disney or Universal Parks but I find that to be a waste
of time and energy. After the hour to hour and a ½ of herding all the people up to get on the buses to and from the parks you really aren’t left with a lot of time in the park, tops maybe 4 hours. Also, the arrival times usually drop you mid-day to an already crowded park. In addition, there are no discounts due to the shortened stay at the park, so unless you are a season pass holder, you will be paying whatever the full admission for that day is at the park.
This led us to look for closer and more reasonable options for an excursion. On a recent cruise, we were able to make a trip out to the Brevard Zoo and could not have been any happier. The drive is about a ½ hour from the port and it was pretty easily to get a Lyft/Uber there in under 10 minutes after leaving the ship. We were able to purchase our tickets for the zoo ahead of time from the zoo’s website, but you can also buy tickets when arriving at the zoo as well. We also booked ahead a private hour tour and a sloth encounter that I will go into detail with a little later.
First and foremost, this really isn’t a traditional zoo. It is really closer to an animal sanctuary, as they seem to have the best interest of all of their animals in the zoo. They are also non-profit where a good portion of sales goes right back into the zoo and animals. In addition, the workers seem to really enjoy their job and there are a number of volunteers that help out with the animals as well.
The zoo has a number of different “loops” from native Floridian animals, to African animals and other rescued animals from other zoos or unfortunate situations. Our favorite was the African loop because you could see giraffes and rhinos just chilling in a very large open space. They also build a structure that allowed you to see the giraffes at their eye level which was a pretty amazing sight.
As mentioned earlier, we purchased both a private tour ($15 dollars per person) and a sloth encounter ($45 dollars per person). For the tour, we could not have had a better time. Alec, our tour guide, was so nice and knowledgeable it really made our outing. Being new to the Zoo, he gave us a rundown of the core features of the zoo and really tailored the tour to what we wanted to see. He was so patient with our 8-year-old and answered so many questions for us. As we couldn’t see the whole zoo in an hour, he showed us some of the more entertaining and interesting parts of the zoo and left us with pointers on what we should do with the rest of the day. I would highly recommend the private tour for first timers to the zoo.
As for the sloth encounter, I don’t feel like it was a good value. Don’t get me wrong we had a good time, I was interesting learning about, seeing and feeding a sloth but it really only lasted about 15 minutes and it wasn’t even a private encounter, we had to share the 15 minutes time with another family. Dollar for dollar the tour was so much more a better value. Just prior to our sloth encounter, we saw the they were having stingray feeding sessions where you purchase food to feed to the stingrays. Prior to feeding the stingrays, they taught us all about the stingrays eating patterns and diet and then we all got to feed the stingrays shrimp and bits of fish. For the three of us that only cost $20, which was much less and just as fun and entertaining as the sloth encounter.
They also have a few other activities that we didn’t partake in but looked interesting. They had a train ride where you get to see some different animals throughout parts of the zoo that you cannot access on foot. There is also a kayak activity where you paddle through a stream that runs throughout the park. Didn’t have that much courage for that one, because its Florida and there has to be gators in those waters. Alec assured us that it was very safe and we did see people on the activity from time to time.
They also have a little waterplay area to cool off with. Our son was not happy with us that we didn’t bring our swimsuits, because that looked like a fun thing to do to cool off in the Florida heat. He did play in their kids’ playground area for a bit. They have a structure that he could run around in that he found very entertaining to get to the top of it and look down.
We spent about 4 hours at the zoo and felt like what we did, in relation to the amount of money we paid, was a very good value. Again, it was very easy to get a ride share back to the ship and we called it a day. We definitely would go back to the zoo and hope that you check it out as well. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.
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