Halloween will be here and gone before you know it, and if you aren’t careful, celebrating the holiday can leave a nasty mark on your wallet. The key to saving money at various Halloween-related events and attractions is to get the most bang for your buck.
The following family-friendly travel attractions allow you to maximize your holiday fun without breaking the bank:
Indiana: Each October the Fort Wayne Children’s Zoo hosts a Halloween Extravaganza. The zoo goes wild with Halloween activities, such as pumpkin decorating contests, costume parades and a Monster Mash dance party. Kids can also have a ball on cartoon-themed days when they are able to meet and take photos with their favorite characters. The zoo also features a corn maze for kids, a free train ride, and, of course, plenty of candy for children who show up wearing their Halloween costumes.
Texas: Your kids will 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. Plus, if you arrive early 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 during the countdown to Halloween in 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. If you are worried about taking your extra-curious kid to the exhibit, rest assured, 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, kids will still get an eyeful. Several times a day the spiders are fed live crickets by museum employees and visitors get to watch as the crafty creatures rapidly immobilize their prey inside sticky venomous silk before consuming them.
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