The Eye of Kris

Continuing with the birthday theme... Yesterday was Mary's birthday, and so I decided to take the day off and take the family on a day trip. We went up to Louisville, KY to check out the zoo there because we had seen a few of their exhibits highlighted on a show called "Ultimate Zoo", which used to run on Animal Planet.

We left as early as we could, considering we didn't know we would be able to go until that morning (Mary had another comittment that got canceled at the last minute). The drive was pretty nice and easy, although Owen didn't quite understand why it was taking us so long to drive to "a different zoo" as he kept calling it.

As members of the Nashville Zoo, we get free or discounted admission into other zoos that are part of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association. In this case, it was free, so that was very nice and made it even more worth the drive up there.

It was a pretty nice zoo. They've got a lot of animals that we don't have in Nashville, like lions, giraffes (although we are getting those soon), polar bears, jaguars, and gorillas. The gorilla exhibit was one of the ones we had seen on "Ultimate Zoo", and it was pretty impressive. Unfortunately, due to the cool weather (mid-50's), there were several animals that were not in their exhibits, including the tigers and hippos.

They had an aviary with Lorikeets just like we have in Nashville, and I took Owen inside to see them. I actually got him to hold a bird on his arm for a while so I could get some pictures. He was a little nervous, but did pretty well with it and I think he enjoyed himself in there.

They also had a train that went all the way around the zoo, and Owen and I went for a ride on that. He sat very still and quiet for the entire ride, and I wasn't sure that he really liked it, but then I had to remind myself that he's just like me, and I tend to enjoy things quietly instead of getting visibly excited all the time. He did, in fact, enjoy it and he mentioned the train several times later in the day.

Believe it or not, there were more and larger hills than we have at our zoo, so we got our exercise. I had the camera, of course, and my new backpack proved to be a great improvement over the previous bag. I was glad I had gotten it. Now I need a bigger memory card, because I filled ours up pretty quickly.

Afterwards, we headed back towards home, and stopped for dinner at Red Lobster in Rivergate. Owen slept in the car pretty much all the way back to Nashville, so he was well rested and happy at the restaurant. We had a nice dinner and then came home to put the boys to bed and settle in for the night. It was a good day.