Annual Trip to a New Zoo

Last Sunday we decided to take a day and do a family event as long as we were already on a weekend getaway. My parents drove with us into Winnipeg on Saturday night and got in a great game of Canadian bowling with the girls and me in the basement of our hotel that night while Mike stretched out on the hotel bed. Sunday, though, my parents were heading for an outdoor theater performance, and the four of us wanted to celebrate being, well, the four of us together and away from home!

Mainly this was my idea....vacation, relax, rest, rejuvenate, etc.......

By the time we had spent an hour finding the zoo entrance, I wasn't so sure those were going to be the correct words for our day.

We were incredibly hungry, so after sunscreening, we made a dash toward the first food station Mike had found on the map.

It was closed.

Onto the next one (after a short bathroom stop for one of our party....guesses as to who it was?) where we found hotdogs. All.Kinds.of.Hotdogs.

Mike ordered a dog with cheese and bacon bits and onions, I think. I couldn't get past the fear that the cheese might be processed, plastic-type goop (apologies to my father-in-law who believes that is the only truly edible type of cheese!), so the girls and I had plain hotdogs. All-beef, yes. Pretty brown-colored, yes. Still, boiled hotdogs.

As you can see, Sunny has a definite preference for meat over wheat, it seems. The evening before this, she had eaten her hamburger, which was approximately the size of her head, out of her bun. This afternoon, she daintily attempted to eat the hotdog out of the bun while holding the bun. She finally just tossed the bun aside and went with the hotdog.

Not surprisingly, her Daddy was proud and decided he and little Sunny needed their pictures taken next to this sign. I found it outside the snow leopard cage.

This is an up-close, readable version. Enough said?

Yep, that's one proud Daddy!

I'm not sure if this is readable, but it says "Smoking Corral". Apparently the zoo is not a smoke-free environment, but if you are a smoker, you have to cage yourself periodically to partake in your habit. I got the giggles. When we went on a tram ride, one of the more obnoxious men in front of us told his niece and nephew to "Look at the cage with the smokers!" It really was pretty funny.

This zoo has a serious problem with pests. I have an out-of-focus shot of a gopher that I wanted to post with the title, "Not the way Auntie Laura would shoot a gopher". The gophers and geese are horrendous. They are not cute; they are not particularly friendly; they have been way overfed by tourists/city slickers who have no idea that they're creating a hazard!

I do think this fuzzy little guy is cute. I do.

Seriously, though, when you start pecking on my daughter? You're no longer cute. You're a target, and my husband has great aim!

We had gotten some much-needed water and were resting at a picnic table in the shade before heading to the car. Suddenly, Miss Mouse jumped up, knocked her bottle of water over, and looked at me with a shocked expression on her face. She blurted out, "That goose tried to eat me!". We'd been sort of joking all afternoon, as the gophers nearly ran over our feet under the tables, and the geese hovered waiting for crumbs to drop, about how they were all "looking for free handouts", but it really wasn't very funny for Miss Mouse when the silly thing came up and pecked at her leg! She's such a trooper; she had a goofy look on her face when she made her horrified announcement about being goose-food, and when I asked her if it had scared her, she grabbed onto me and hung on crying until a couple with a baby sat at our table and started trying to feed ice cream to their 15-month old. Apparently that was entertaining enough to overcome the goose-nibbling, but Miss Mouse was definitely no fan of geese by the time we left. Personally, I kept giggling thinking about Grammy trying to sit and eat at a table with gophers running in between her feet!

We decided that we needed to stop at the tropical bird house before going to the car just so that Miss Mouse's last memory of the zoo was not being pecked by a lazy goose!

This butterfly came from the butterfly house which was a much more popular attraction for us than were the random flocks of geese and hoards of gophers.

The zoo had a lot of peacocks, too, but thankfully they weren't quite as brazen as the other roaming creatures. It was a treat to see several fanned out like this. They seemed to really like being with the antelope, so the girls started referring to the peacocks as the "friends" ("of the antelopes" is what they meant, but they dropped that last part and just used "friends").

At one point, I did ask Mike to take the girls to see the zebras because I just could not move myself out of the shade for any longer than I had to (and I knew we had a trek back to the van). I knew Sunny was pretty exhausted, and I was thankful that Mike swooped her up on his shoulders for the walk to the vehicle. I guess, though, I just didn't realize quite how tired she was.

I have never seen anyone 'sleep eat' before, but that is definitely, positively, truly what was going on here.

Beyond the fact that it scared me half to death initially because I was afraid she was going to choke on the silly chips, it really was hilarious. I kept a close eye on her, and she stopped after a chip or two. When she woke up, two hours later (around supper time), she got a big grin on her face and said, "Oh, look! More chips!" because most of the bag had spilled out next to her in her carseat. I guess it's the small things in life.....

It was a successful day, and it was a fun time. We did, however, drive out of Winnipeg listening to Sunny adamantly arguing with her sister about how we were NOT in Winnipeg. We decided that when someone is so very tired that she doesn't know what city we are in, that must be when "sleep eating" can occur. There was also the conversation in the gas station with her Daddy that went like this:

Daddy: "What would you like to eat?"

Sunny: "I want chips."

Daddy: "Okay, here's a bag."

Sunny: "No!!!! I don't wike chips!"

Daddy: "Okay, then what do you want to eat?"

Sunny: "Chips."

There were a few points where I began thinking that vacations with 3 and 5-year olds are far over-rated, but after rehydrating myself with about three 12-ounce glasses of water, I decided it was a fun time; I've laughed to tears over these pictures and the memories we made tonight. Maybe we'll do a new zoo every year.

Maybe.