Safari Park

Sorry, this is another post with tons of pictures and not much else-- I hope it's not too boring!

Anyway, we'd been hearing about this Safari Park in Natural Bridge for a while and finally decided to check it out at the end of spring break.  It did not disappoint!

At the entrance, staring at the sun

Basically, for the first part, you drive around with buckets of food, and the animals come and eat out of your lap.  This was both totally awesome and a little intimidating.  And a lot messy!

There were a TON of llamas

The llamas could get a little aggressive-- at one point, three of them surrounded our car and wouldn't let us drive forward!  When we didn't give them food right away, one of them even started kicking our car!  But the joke's on them-- we don't care about our beat up old car that much anyway!  We refuse to give in to bullies!  We had to wait until some other car got their attention and then we escaped.  (We felt a little bad for that other car, but what could we do?)

But the baby llamas sure were cute!!!

Why, hello!

Thankfully this guy did not try to stick his head in our car...

No clue what this hairy beast is, but I kinda liked him-- he looked like a teddy bear version of a cow!

Camille got a little nervous and preferred sitting in the backseat.  Here she is showing me how she felt about the animals.

She's fine, though.  Really!

Well, she's still crazy.  But she wasn't actually traumatized or anything!

This big fella got snot ALL over the windows and the steering wheel

They had rhinos up on the hill where you could see them, but not get close.  Probably a good idea...

And camels, too!  Apparently these guys are the kings of stealing your entire bucket of food.  But they were cordoned off when we were there, so that wasn't a problem.

And a buffalo, too!  And see those birds in the background?  I want to call them emus, but I think that's wrong...  Maybe those are rheas?

Looking at the zebras

Kendra is hesitant to open her window for this big guy

Smiley Ryder

Maybe this is an emu...?

And, of course, Ryder was very excited to see this pig!

There were a bunch of other animals, too: giraffes, reindeer, kudu...  It was a lot of fun.

After we were done with the safari drive, we left the park to get lunch, then came back for the walk-through zoo section.  This section had tigers, wolves, peacocks, penguins, flamingos, vultures, an eagle owl and a bunch of other random animals to see.  It was a lot of fun, and perfect weather! The only thing that was too bad is that we had other plans for the evening and had to rush out to meet up with some friends-- we could easily have stayed for another hour.

Craig was very excited about the kangaroos.  He's trying to convince me that we need a pet wallaby.  (At least he's given up on the idea of getting a monkey!)

The budgie sticks were fun, too1

Flamingos!

And here's Ryder trying to imitate the flamingos!

It was a super fun day-- I highly recommend the Safari Park at Natural Bridge!  But be warned-- you WILL need to wash your car (inside and out!) afterwards!