Of Aquamaids and Giant Sponges

Family vacations down Florida's two-lane Dixie Highway -- skirting the ocean from the Georgia border to Miami -- and along the once-well-traveled Route 19 on the west coast are fond recollections for many baby boomers, including me. My brother and I shared the back seat on many excursions. Just about the time a fight was close to erupting, one of those quirky roadside attractions would appear, and we were let loose to cool down.

I left the Sunshine State about the time Disney arrived. I now have an 18-year-old nephew, Gene, who has never seen a real live mermaid or an "attraction" instead of a theme park. His generation's entertainment is cyberspace, surround sound and virtual reality. Still, he agreed to accompany me on a tour of old-fashioned tourist traps.

We had three days in the fall. I picked Florida's west coast, targeting four destinations of remembered family outings -- Sarasota Jungle Gardens, Cypress Gardens, Tarpon Springs and Weeki Wachee. Memories of aquamaids on water skis who never got their hair wet, cockatoos riding unicycles, alligators snapping up dead chickens and flamingos eating out of my hand were packed along with sunscreen and a map.

Jungle Gardens (Sarasota)

"Oh, my gosh, it's Frosty!" I exclaimed, sitting up front at the bird show at Jungle Gardens. "I know that bird. He was on 'Ed Sullivan.' "

True, the trainer said. Frosty, a Moluccan cockatoo, did perform on TV before the Beatles and is still riding a unicycle across a wire at the grand old age of 70-something.

A slim crowd -- five blond Danish children, their parents and two senior couples -- watched the show with us as Frosty and his macaw friends did stunts requiring the intelligence of a 3-year-old, which the birds have. Shows are held in a wooden pavilion with wooden benches, not in an air-conditioned amphitheater. Tropical birds sit on tree branches nearby, not in cages. Everyone could ask a question, have their picture snapped with a parrot perched on each arm and feed the flamingos (25 cents for a handful of pellets).

The entrance is a squat building with a Polynesian roofline. The gardens' former owners lived in what is now the snack bar and shell museum, and the koi pond, near the snack bar, served as the family swimming pool.

When difficult times came to the attraction, which opened in 1940, the current owners decided they couldn't rely solely on tourists.

"We believe our survival depends on positioning ourselves as an educational zoological gardens," said spokeswoman Luanne Brannen, noting that the attraction has more than 200 birds and animals. A program called Partners in Education sells packages to local businesses, which sponsor events and seminars at the gardens. "We have many different groups participating, from public-school children to at-risk teens and adults."

Last year's attendance was 160,000. "We are definitely not in the Disney league," Brannen said. (More than 16 million visited the Orlando theme park in 2005, industry followers estimate.)

Five bird, animal and reptile shows are presented daily. We learned that the eastern diamondback rattlesnake can coil, strike, inject venom and strike again in seven-tenths of a second. He was sleeping when we visited.

The zoological garden is unusual in that 85 percent of its birds and animals are rescued. Rosco, an Aldabra tortoise kin to the Galapagos, was liberated from a circus where he was saddled and ridden. Many of the birds -- which can reach 100 years old in captivity -- outlived their owners; others were sent by law enforcement agencies who had confiscated them for various reasons.