The zoo!!

On Friday I joined a few folks on their trip to the zoo. It was great fun and I really do have about a zillion pictures, but I'll only share 27 of them. :) Here are glimpses of our day, along with the people that I went with and a couple of short videos of a little girl that was THRILLED to be on a carousel ride!! :o)

First off, we'll start with the people...

This is Amelia, Heidi, Candy & Blaire, posing with the elephant. Okay...it's a fake elephant. Just in case you were concerned.
This is Kate's Mom, Wendy, along with her grandkids, Fischer & Hazen (of whom belong to Kate). I just thought that this was SUCH a cute picture!! I forget where they were going, but they were sure eager to go with Grandma!! :)

Beautiful baby Blaire...She is just SO precious! We love her lots!! :)

Here are the womenfolk of our group who were at the zoo (minus me, of course, since I'm taking the picture). There's Heidi and Amelia in the front and then Nora, Kristy and Candy in the back. The two menfolk of the group did NOT want to go on the zoo's train ride with us, so they kept the two little babies and hung out in the shade somewhere. Their loss!! ;)

Aaron and Amelia. I believe that if Amelia had to choose, this may just have been the highlight of her day!

Now on to the animals...some of the pictures are dark or have bright spots on them because of the flash, but I tried to choose the best of what I had. ALL of the pictures should be set up so that if you click on them once, they will enlarge and you can see them better. That may help with some of the darker ones.

The seal showing off his special talents.

Polar bear

Of course, this baby giraffe moved his head as soon as I had taken the picture, but just prior to that, his entire head was stuffed into the tree. They must have a feeding hold there or something. It was kind of cute!

Camels

Buffalo

Peacock

Zebras

Some type of African animal that I can't remember its name

Elephant

The elephant decided it needed a bath, so it was showing us how she washed herself. This was mid-explosion of the water. :)

This hippo was SO funny! It was hideously hot out on Friday and so everyone, animals included, were doing all kinds of things to just stay cool. This guy just stayed submerged like this. Every once in awhile, he'd bring his nose up and get some air, but for the most part he'd keep as much as he could underwater. I think that we all wished we could have done that, too! It. Was. Hot.

Rhino

Silverback gorilla (I think that's what he was called...hence, the silver on his back in the second picture)

Tired gorilla...okay, I have no idea what his actual name is. :)

If you look closely, this monkey thing had a baby or two on her back. It was adorable!

Penguins

Elephant

Cheetah

Lions

As I already mentioned, I think that Amelia's favorite part of the day was the carousel ride that her daddy took her on. Here's proof of that! :)

Even though it was really hot out, we all had a fun day and I'm SO glad that I went! I've been wanting to go for a few years now, but it's never worked out. I couldn't have planned a better day at the zoo!