Haunted houses with crazed ghouls chasing you with bloodied limbs is great for teens and adults, but if you are traveling with young children, then you might want to keep the Halloween chills and thrills to a minimum.
Fortunately, there are a myriad of naturally semi-spooky Halloween-related options available for parents with youngsters. The following attractions skip the fake blood and haunted howls, and rely on nature to amuse visitors:
TEXAS
Kids love exploring Austin’s Bat Colony during the month of October. That’s when the world’s largest urban bat colony preps for Halloween. Mexican free-tail bats emerge in downtown Austin at dusk each night until November. If you arrive early enough you can score a front row seat to see the bats take flight en masse. More than 1.5 million bats move like a dark stream through the streets of Austin each night as they forage for food.
CALIFORNIA
Creepy crawlers come alive in California at the Spider Pavilion at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Forget about Hollywood special effects, this is the real deal! Hundreds of free-roaming spiders spin their webs in a walk-through landscaped exhibit. In addition to watching the eight-legged insects weave their webs, you can view spider feedings and learn about the webs’ intricate architecture and engineering. More than a dozen local and exotic species are on display, including the large golden silk spiders of the Nephila genus, which can spin a web several feet wide. Also on hand are the golden orb weavers of the Argiope genus, which are known for their yellow and black markings.
Museum curators say that the goal of the exhibit is to “convey how harmless and gentle these animals are and how important they are to our ecosystem.” Fortunately, for parents with curious kids, the museum has a strict no-touch policy. The spiders stick to their webs along the sides of the pavilion and human visitors remain on the other side of the exhibit.
Despite not being able to handle the spiders, visitors still get an eyeful. Several times a day the spiders are fed live crickets by museum employees and visitors get to watch as the creatures rapidly immobilize their prey inside sticky venomous silk before consuming them.
The Spider Pavilion is open through November 8, 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tickets are $3 for adults and $1 for children 5-12 in addition to the admission price for the museum, which is $9 for adults and $6.50 for children.
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