A local family vacation...

This year we decided not to do any major vacation away from home. Instead Jason and the girls made a trip to the visitor's center in town and came home with a bag filled with pamphlets of local attractions.  The process of narrowing down the vast array of options to a few we decided to do this year would be a blog post all on its own.  But instead we'll fast forward to today - our day trip to the Safari Park located a little over an hour south of us in Natural Bridge, VA.  Kali was the only one of our family who had gone before and it was a good number of years ago when she was treated to a fun day there with friends.  I believe that time the goats and the gravel got the most attention.

I will admit to a little sticker shock when I did the math on what it would cost our family to drive through a park with lots of animals wanting to eat food from buckets we would hold out our car windows (should we choose to purchase said feed).  I had to remind myself that this was in lieu of say a repeat trip to Cape May or Maine or...  As we headed home at the end of the day, I took back any comments about the high price. It was well worth every penny of it.  What a very fun and full day our family had there together.  And the littlest was so tuckered out that she got about two bites of her rice cake chewed before she was completely sacked out (we weren't even out of the park lane when Kali said, "that didn't take very long").

Here's are a few highlights that I've just gotten from various family members:

• The bugling of the elk.
• Feeding the giraffes.
• Feeding the budgies (parakeets).
• A lovely and chilly picnic lunch.
• All the animals except for the camel that ate the bucket (Alida).

Kali is now off getting herself ready for bed, at 8:30 p.m. so she is ready for her first soccer game at 8 a.m. tomorrow. So I'm going to let pictures give a good glimpse to some additional highlights of the day. I loved being a homeschooling family today. I imagine tomorrow will be very different around there but today we had many of the exhibits all to ourselves and lots of attention from the animals.  We could have used a little less attention from the "llama mafia," as they call it.  It was downright challenging to get moving in our car as one certain llama (pictured here) would stand right in front of our car and would not budge.  We even tried enticing it with food and as soon as we would pull the bucket back in it would run around to the front and plant itself along our front bumper!

The funniest but slightly alarming moment for all of us was mentioned by Alida above.  We were warned (see the sign here) that the camels liked to steal buckets.  I got past the one humped camels but had to hold onto my bucket with both hands and only let them get their lips on the bucket for a moment. I must have let down my guard momentarily when we got to the two humped camels.  Before I knew it one camel had snatched my bucket, feed and all, and before we knew it was chewing on the whole thing.  This was very disturbing to Alida and surprising to the rest of us. We assumed it would give up soon enough and spit the whole thing out, but no!  We watched in disbelief, taking moments to try to calm Alida, as the bucket slowly made its way through the camel's jaws and disappeared.  When we got back to the gift shop I told the woman at the register that we tried to keep it from the camel but it didn't work.  She said, "Oh, that was probably Hercules."  So he is known not only for bucket stealing but bucket eating...

Here's the camel getting started.  As you will note, Jason is assuming he'll get all the flavor out of it and reject the plastic:

Not so:

The other thing that disturbed Alida slightly were the budgies. But they were also a big hit - with her and with Kali.  We hadn't bought any of the little "bird lollipops" initially (since we had already forked over about $70 for admission and 4 buckets of feed for our family).  But there was a kind couple in with the birds when we got there that gave us their sticks as they were leaving.  There were enough seeds left that we were still quite popular with the birds. We spent considerable time having the little birds climb all over us and then both girls bought a fresh stick to feed again before we called it a day:

Here's some other pictures from our day.  We had planned to fit two outings into one day - figuring we wouldn't want to be at the Safari Park for more than a few hours. We were wrong!  So the Natural Bridge outing will have to wait until another day.  Instead we had our supper picnic at home, played some games (Jason trounced Kali and me in Gang of Four and Alida beat me in Uno) and now are ready to sleep!  It was a day full of fun memory making together...

Anything wrong with this picture?  Was the joey really comfortable?

Just a little unsure...

She loved it from the very beginning!

Jason and I were pretty smitten with these two gals today.  They are both so fun to be with!

I love Alida's second set of ears with her little hands poking through.

"Everybody needs a baby kangaroo..."

Wow!  Such amazing creatures.

For most of our lunch we had the entire pavilion to ourselves and a great show of many kinds of animals on the hillside behind us.

I think I've already commented on how sweet they are!

Members of the llama mafia away us!

Jason swept out our car within the hour after we got home.  It was at a new level of filth. But we have yet to wash the outside which has considerable amounts of animal slobber on the windows...

These little fellows were just about right (in terms of size) for Alida!

Note the breaking bucket...

Here's before I lost that bucket!

Alida is eyeing the camel!

Some final goodbyes to some of the favorites.

Alida would not be sticking with feeding the goat had she realized that the baby camel was peering down at her and getting awfully close to the top of her head.

There were so many of them!  It was such a novelty for us and kind of funny that they shared the pen with chickens (I'm sure Jason gave the chickens a good once over, but I don't think the rest of us paid much attention).