The Orlando Florida International Reptile Expo was smaller this year than last. One vendor even came to setup, saw how small the entire show was and chose not to stay. Unfortunately, that vendor was a cage manufacturer, one of the mainreasons I went to the show.

Lucky for me, there were a few other vendors with quality cages. One in particular caught my attention because the cages were not made of wood. I had concernswith the wood warping over time as well as holding in unwanted smells. So, whenI came across Dragons4You.net, I stoppedto chat with the owner. Another expo-goer was nearby and overhead my questions.He has been using these cages for over a year and highly recommended them. Afterspending quite a bit of time looking over the cages and asking questions I wasconfident this was the caging solution I wanted.

After securing my cages, we continued to browse the show to see what the othervendors had to offer. We stopped and talked with PC Reptiles, who sold us Marco last year. As always, he answered all of our questions about thevarious snakes he had at the show. They ranged from a beautiful piebald morphto “standard” ball pythons. I wanted to add another snake to the collection,but did not want to duplicate anything we had already. We looked at severalbreeds, but finally decided on a pair of CostaRican boas. There isn’t much available on the Internet about this particular boa, but from what he said the care is the same as the red tail.

My youngest daughter had been looking at all of the animals intently throughoutthe show. She was particularly fascinated with the geckos and uromastyx. Wetook a lunch break and talked about what we had seen so far and if we wantedto add yet another reptile to the already large group we had at home. Naturally,everyone thought we needed just one more. We agreed to walk through the showfrom beginning to end and look at everything once more.

This final walk led us to the leopard gecko. It was by far the favorite amongeveryone. Let me clarify: it became the favorite after the girls learned theycould not hold frogs. They really wanted a pair of red eye tree frogs, but couldn’tbear to own something they could never touch. We selected a very young leopard gecko with awesome coloring. It’s too young to determine if it’s a boy orgirl. For now, it has no name, but is already showing a wonderful personality.

We brought home the cages we purchased and moved in the bearded dragons. Wealso put the boa pair in one of the new cages. Just these three cages look wonderful and are definitely the appearance I want my collection to have. We are awaiting the remaining cages to be finished so we can finally haveeverything organized. I can’t wait to have all of the reptiles in their newhomes.

So, even though the show was much smaller than I’d hoped, I still came homea very happy herper.

Tags: Hobbies