Our family vacation to Africa

OK, it wasn't really a vacation to Africa, but a mini "stay-cation" to a little African wildlife park near Sedona. A few weeks ago we were going to Sedona to go to a time share presentation so that we could get a free cruise including airfare (ya, we're dorks), so we decided to make it fun and go to this zoo. Lily asks to go to the zoo every single day. If it's not the zoo, than it's the pet store.

It's not a regular zoo, it's bigger and you can get much closer to all the animals and the animals seem much happier, they do more than just sleep. The funnest part was a ride on a big, converted school bus through free-range animals. The bus was painted with zebra stripes, which Lily loved. They gave us broccoli and sweet potato sticks to feed to the giraffe. We all got to hold our veggies out the window and the giraffe ate out of our hands, Lily did it and wasn't even scared, even though it's head is as big as her whole body. After we all fed it, we turned around and the driver/guide had to get out of the bus to do something with a gate. The giraffe came over and stuck his entire head and neck through the door of the bus, about a foot away from us because we were on the front row. It was trying to get to the bucket of treats that were for the other animals. Jared was holding on to Jack and trying to keep the bucket from tipping over while me and Lily were petting it's head and ears, it was so awesome. We fed it a little more out of our hands and got giraffe slobber all over us. This video is right before he stuck his head all the way in.

We drove on to see some zebra's super up close, including 2 little babies and when we drove away they kept chasing us, as Lily says in this video "I love Zebras!"

We saw lots of other antelope-type animals and then we got to what Lily later said was her favorite, the camels. Again, the camel came right up to the bus to eat out of the drivers hand, so it was about a foot away from Lily and I. I've mentioned it before, but Lily talks about camel rides all the time. It started when we went on a camel ride with my two sisters this spring, here's a picture. Any time I'm on the floor, or low enough for her to reach, she jumps on my back and yells for a camel ride. If she or anyone is on all fours, she says they're a camel, and if the cats stretch so that they have a hump on their backs, they're camels. Anyway, this time, she got to see it up close, it didn't do anything special, just grunted, but she said it was her favorite part. This is Lily's camel pose, which she did all by herself with no prompting.

We also saw and petted snakes.

We saw lots and lots of tigers within a few feet, licking their lips and looking at fat, juicy, tender Jack haunches. Black bears and baby grizzly's, wolves, lions, a rhino, and others. The end of our day was the tiger splash show, where the handlers armed with inflatable toys, get a couple of huge tigers to jump 6 feet into the air and dive into a big pool. It was great fun, and one even roared a couple times which Lily enjoyed, because as she says, she's a "great growler".

After all this we were filthy (it was a beautiful day, but windy and dirt was blowing the whole time) and tired, but we still managed to get the the time share thing, which took twice as long as expected. Other than that, it was a fun time and we're excited to go back to Sedona again to see more of that area of Arizona.