Hubby and I once called Jacksonville home. While we completed our undergraduate degrees, we lived in and loathed Jacksonville.
But a lot has changed in the 10 years since we graduated and we’ve been back several times to visit friends and attend events at our Alma Mater. And while we’ve always taken the kids, we’ve not done much with them. We usually spend our time eating at our favorite restaurants (European Street, Seven Bridges, Ragtime, La Napolera), hanging out with friends and often times shopping at the nearby St. Augustine Outlets.
But that doesn’t mean Jacksonville lacks things for kids to do. In fact, the last time we were up there, we had big plans to do tons of fun stuff with the kiddos (of course, hubby ended up terribly sick and I ended up as an out of town single parent).
But we did get to go to The MOSH (museum of science and history) and the girls had so much fun! The museum houses permanent exhibits like a history of Jacksonville and Northeast Florida; a journey through the digestive track; a whale, dolphin and manatee exhibit and more as well as a rotating exhibit.
(unfortunately, the pictures have been lost and yet to be found!)And, of course, depending on the time of year you can always head to the beach. Being in Northern Florida, the beach is not swimmable year-round like it is in the South where we are but it is always fun to visit and walk in the sand!
This previous visit, we were finally able to do some fun things with the kids. We revisited the beach and let the kids splash in the tide pools.
We also finally got the kids out to Fort Caroline. Hubby and I had visited once before in college but haven’t been back since. The fort, which is a reconstruction of the first French settlement in the US, shows life of both the Timucuan Indians of the region and the fort with lots of information on the building of the fort and it’s demise.
There is also a nice little visitors center at Fort Caroline which describes the habit of North Florida and how people have lived there for hundreds of years and has a few hands-on activities for the kids.
We also found an awesome little nature walk area on the Intracoastal Waterway called Castaway Island Preserve. The free park has walking trails out to the water where you can overlook the serenity of Jacksonville’s Intracoastal (vastly different from the waterway in our home area) as well as a paved path with animal tracks the kids can follow and guess what they belong to with information on each native animal. This was one of the highlights of our trip for the kids!
Another kid favorite is obviously the Jacksonville Zoo. We took the kids for the first time and spent hours and hours wandering around. The Zoo doesn’t seem too big on the map but it is huge once you get walking around! The highlight for the kids was definitely the train (which is an extra charge but you get unlimited rides) which takes you around the backside of the zoo enclosures and get to learn about how the zoo cares for the animals and about some of the more exciting animals they have that you may miss otherwise. The elephants were the most exciting part of our entire trip for Sugarplum who is currently obsessed with them and hasn’t gotten to see them in real life that she remembers. Doodle loved the giraffes which you can feed (also for an extra fee) and Honeybun was over the moon to get to see two rescued bald eagles.
