Weeki Wachee

Greemaw actually lives near real mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs, so we just had to go see them for Pooh Bear's sake. Like all five-year-old girls, Pooh Bear is fascinated with all that swirling hair, glamour (one must be a natural beauty to apply for mermaid training), and flashy scales. In fact, at age two one night while swimming in the bath tub, she begged me to turn her feet into fins.

Weeki Wachee Springs opened in 1947 with an underwater theater to the springs, the only one of its kind, and has had it's share of fame and celebrity visitors like who else? Esther Williams. Don Knotts. Elvis. I was amazed that the theater is a window to the natural wonder of the springs instead of some kind of tank. Fish and turtles swam all around the performers.

The mermaids train for up to a year and their star can hold her breath for over four minutes. Good grief! When this young lady dove to the depths of the spring, the audience was invited to try and hold our breath too. I made it less than a minute.

The mermaids take occasional breaths from air hoses, breathein to go up, blow out to go down, and keep their lungs filled somewhere in the middle to suspend themselves just so for viewing of the water ballet. They performed to prerecorded music and audio tracks, miming the words. Tator declared the whole idea "CHEEZY" after the first show, and spent the rest of the day swimming and tubing in the spring, and rushing down water slides with his brothers.

Little Mermaid twice and Fish Tales were the mermaid show offerings of the day. Pooh Bear didn't want to miss anything except the seawitch the second time around in Little Mermaid. The seawitch actually snuck up to the surface and suddenly poked her manical head out of a little window very near us, and nearly scared Pooh Bear out of her skin. Buck had to sleep next to our little girl for a while when we put her to bed. "Since the seawitch lives so near Greemaw, does she know the way to Greemaw's house?" she inquired.