|
|
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Sunday
We woke up fairly refreshed... the kids slept great, although they accused one-another of pulling the sheets off. Jenny and I both had awoken at some point during the night and put the covers back on them.
It was so nice not having to rush around to get ready and be anywhere by any specific time. I love that. Jenny was cooperative and didn't mind me not rolling out of bed until around 8:30 to shower. We all headed down for a nice breakfast together.
Emily saw her friend she had made at the pool last night - Sasha. Sasha and her older brother Roman were both adopted from Russia about 7 years ago. They were from Iowa and were just in St. Louis for the one night and day. We gave Sasha Jenny's e-mail address so she could write to Emily. Hope that Emily's knack for meeting new people will be used by God to advance His Kingdom.
My beautiful bride and the boys wide awake and ready to take on the day!
We headed out from the hotel and drove the short distance to the St. Louis zoo. Unfortunately we forgot our Mesker zoo pass (which gave us half-price on the zooline railroad, children's zoo, carousel, sea lion show, 3-D movie and the Wild Ride. So, it was really nice to be close to the zoo as we were able to drive back to the hotel and get our zoo pass from the room (and the young fella' at the parking lot gate let us leave and come back through his lane even though he "really wasn't supposed to.")
We did end up buying the "safari pass" to do all of the above items, and with the mesker zoo card it was half-price, so we got to do it all (except for the train since it broke down) for $6 each. And since the train broke down, I went to guest services late in the day and asked for a "pro-rated discount" since we did not get to ride the train. (With the pass, we should have been able to ride it all day.) I was satisfied to get my $7 and some change refund.
I splurged 50cents and let the kids smash a penny, engraving it with a monkey. Only in America, right?
Map in hand, Jacob was allowed to pick our route and he wanted to head towards the elephants first.. ah, how proud I was. We walked through the "River's Edge" exhibit and I forced the family to stand for this shot of the dead impala in the tree.
Love the gi-normous African aquarium where the fish try to feed off of the hippo's bottoms.
We finally made it to the star of the show - the Elephants! And as if adult elephants alone are not cool enough, we got to see an added bonus: baby elephant. This little gal will be one year old in August of '07. They said they have another baby elephant that was born in February, but she stays inside until late in the evening as she is still bottle-fed. We missed getting some video of the baby playing as she stomped/ran through the water. Really cool.
In case you weren't aware: Elephants good; donkeys bad.
After we saw how long it took us to just get through the River's Edge exhibits, I decided to take the map and set up a schedule to enable us to see as many of the animal feedings and shows as possible. It hurt my head trying to figure out what shows started at what time and how to get to everything we wanted to see in time. We mapped out our route as follows:
12:30 sea lion feeding
1:00 sea lion show (emily was chosen from the crowd to work with the trainer and the female sea lions. she was able to throw  them several fish and even a large squid towards the end of the act. jen got video of the show - i may try to post that later.)
2:00 insectarium
2:30ish - lunch
3:00 - children's zoo (who trains who) showed how they train some animals
3:30 - feed the penguins
4:00 - feed the bears
Our camera batteries ran out at some point, so we missed a lot of photos unfortunately. Had a great day at the zoo - headed back to the hotel, let the kids swim awhile while I blogged a bit, while Jen read watching the kids swim. Then I read while Jen worked out for about 40 minutes.
Headed back to the room and ate some sammiches, apples, cherries, peaches an' stuff while the kid watched the "extreme cake challenge" on food network.
7/15/2007 05:43:00 PM by Todd Bacon
3 comments
|
