Butterfly Birthday

Every year to celebrate my birthday, I spend a day with my son. I prefer time with him in lieu of a gift. This year I told him I wanted to be inside where it was cool.

After a lunch of sushi, and a visit to my favorite chocolatier, he brought me to The Butterfly Place.

It's a sun-filled atrium filled with butterflies. It was not air-conditioned.
You can see hundreds of butterflies, but you can't touch them. In this photo of my son, he's aiming at a butterfly in the lower right, but a yellow one is flying nearby. I was glad a had a camera with a huge memory card, and had brought my spare battery, because I took lots of pictures. Most of them looked like this...(a butterfly was there a second ago)and this. (Drat!)But if you get lucky, you get pictures like this, of butterflies resting.
There are lots of beautiful flowers, like this hibiscus.You have look carefully, because sometimes the butterflies blend in.
or look like flowers.
But the one butterfly you really want to photograph is the big Blue Morpho, who will fly inches away from your head in a looping up and down motion. This butterfly is gigantic, about seven inches across, and rarely sits still with its wings open so you can photograph the stunning iridescent blue. Mostly, you'll get pictures like this.
and this. Here are four Blue Morphos, resting. Patience and luck may reward you.If you get REALLY lucky, a butterfly might land on your hat, so you can get a good picture.or not.After our visit to The Butterfly Place, my son and I had dinner at a restaurant called 900 Degrees. It was spectacular. Then we went to see the last Harry Potter movie.

We had a great day!


(You can read about last year's day here.)