one sunny sunday

I've started going to a home group here in England. A couple from the group invited me to join them and their visiting friends to go to a wildlife park/zoo on Sunday. They picked me up and took me back to their house where they were still slowly getting ready to leave. Just ready to have a big cooked breakfast (11am) I sat down and joined them for my second breakfast. Eventually we did leave and go to Port Lympne--A Wild Experience. It's a big open range zoo. Kinda funny to think of paddocks of English countryside filled with Animals from all over the world. Anyway, we hoped in one of the tour trucks, just the kind I think of when I think of Africa. They were fun. The roads were bumpy and the truck bumbled over them bouncing us around. I was a gleeful little child. ^^

We got to see a number of baby animals too starting with this baby elephant who is 4yrs old. Mostly we rolled past paddocks of animals but there was one section, the African experience, that we went through. They kept a whole bunch of hooved animals plus some ostriches there. All friends of course. No natural preditation taking place there. There was a giraffe that was right by the road unfazed, munching on his lunch. It was great to see one so close up.

When we got off at the first stop we went and looked at the meerkats for a while. They're so cute and there was a little baby one. You can just see him in the pic, furthest to the right. Then we went through a bit of a reptile house with snakes, frogs, icky spiders, lizards...even cockroaches? Then we had icecreams. Yum! Lovely day for it.

We got on a tour truck again after waiting in line for quite a while and stopped off at the carnivores. Most of the cats were in hiding and Emma was sure they had gone off to some Big Cat convention. We did have a pretty good look at the fishing cat though. Then we walked through the primate area and saw some interesting monkeys. My favourite was the colobus monkeys. They have short black hair and long white hair. Remind me a bit of skunks. They have a puff at the end of thier tail and look like they're wearing capes. The looked quite elegant. Never seen them before. The gorilla palace--it certainly was a palace, they had a very impressive playground--had a baby gorilla as well. It was quite useful that we seemed to be following feeding time so all the animals were coming over to the fence as the zoo cars pulled up. We also went to another area and saw some more tigers and lions before we headed home again. Unfortunately my camera played up lots today. I did manage to get some photos but in the end I gave up. So you don't get to see everything.

We sat around and chatted for a while until my friends' friends had to head home. My friends, Bug (childhood nickname that stuck) and Emma, cooked me a yummy tea goatcheese stuffed mushroom and veggies and we ate while we played Settlers of Catan. Unfortunately my set up plan failed me and I struggled to get resources. It would have worked well if the dice would have just been kind enough to roll my numbers. Sigh. It was a fantastic day out. I had lots of fun.