We packed up at the hotel in record time because we were so excited to go check out the Virginia Safari Park. The rain had let up quite a bit and was just showers this morning so we were hoping the animals would be out and hungry. The lady on the phone yesterday said the animals take cover in a downpour, and I thought it would be pretty sad to drive through the whole route and not see any animals. It was only about a 15 minute drive from our hotel to the park, but we missed the turn the first time so it probably took us twice as long while we tried to find the right street. There was another zoo in the other direction, so that threw us off for a while.
Admission was pretty cheap, so we went ahead and bought four white tubs full of animal food. The lady gave us four extra tubs so we split all of them in half just in case we dropped one or a hungry animal ate a little more than we expected. (This turned out to be an excellent idea!)
The first animals we came to were emu and llamas, and sure enough they were so comfortable with people that they just walked right up to the car and waited patiently for you to roll down the window. If the window was already down, they would just stick their head in the car and see if they could reach some food if you didn't have it out for them.
We quickly realized that the hardest part of this whole safari was going to be finding some way to move forward again after we had stopped. Rolling up the window also proved to be a difficult task because you pretty much had to roll it up slowly with their head still in the car until they pulled it out. Sometimes we could push on their nose or their horn and coerce them out. Some of the bigger and stronger animals pulled the buckets right out of our hands and just helped themselves. Sometimes once we rolled up our windows, the animals would walk in front of our car and just stand there, preventing us from moving, or they would press their noses up against the window glass.
Baby llama - so cute!
The animals frequently startled us and their bossy demeanor made us laugh hysterically. In fact, after a little while A and I were laughing so hard we were crying and I couldn't even see well enough to drive anymore. C found the giant heads more than a little intimidating and frequently jumped out of the front seat and crawled in the back seat to hide from them.
As we turned a corner, we saw a sign that said "Warning: Camels!" and it told us that the camels often stole and ate the buckets, but to go ahead and feed them anyway. A was a little unsure but we convinced her to go ahead and roll her window down and hold a bucket out. Well, that camel ripped the bucket right out of her hand and bit it in half!
Of course this sent us into hysterics again, but when I finally recovered, I setup my camera again just in time to see this:
One of the camels stuck his entire head through the window (this is his neck on the right) and grabbed a food bucket that was sitting next to me on the driver's seat. Unfortunately for us, when he tried to pull the bucket back out of the window he turned it upside down and dumped all of the food onto A's seat. C was long gone freaking out in the very back seat by this point, but A and I just laughed and laughed.
We weren't sure what to do next, but we figured that if the camel made the mess, he should clean it up, so we just got out of the way and let him stick his head through the window and eat off the seat.
There was only one problem with this plan. When he finally had eaten all the food off the seat and we rolled up the windows to pull forward a bit and clean up all the food on the floor and in the rest of the car, A realized that her seat was all wet with camel slobber. It took a few minutes to clean the door panel and dry the seat off enough to sit on it, and then we did our best to pick up all the loose food in the car. I am sure I'm going to be finding food pellets in my car for the next several months at least.
When we passed more camels later in the route, we were all too afraid to feed them this time. I thought they looked kind of sad about it, but I just couldn't do it.
We did feed many other animals, though, and met some more animals that deliberately blocked our path, and even a few that ran along side our car as we drove, hoping we'd roll the windows down. These animals are so smart!
Some of the animals were huge, and their mouths barely fit in the buckets!
I wish I could tell you what more of these animals were, but we weren't so sure ourselves. We know we saw some elk, and I'm pretty sure the guy above is a yak. We recognized the bison, and of course the camels and llamas, but we were stumped on most of the rest of them. They didn't even look much like the animals that were in the guidebook they gave us when we came in, so who knows what they were.
The loop was 3 miles long, so there were tons of animals to see and feed. It was on 180 acres and their website says they have over 1,000 animals. It's probably not a big deal when there are tons of cars on the path to carry the load, but this day we were the only ones out there, so we got a ridiculous amount of attention. The animals would sometimes come running at our car from all the way across the path if they saw our window roll down or another animal eating from our bucket. We also realized about halfway through that it had stopped raining, which was really nice (although the animals' heads were still all wet), even though we couldn't exactly drive along with the windows down unless we wanted to get mobbed.
Later I girls break the rules just for a second and pet the zebras (we weren't allowed to pet or feed the zebras, bison, or watusi), and seriously, when will you get another chance to do that? The girls were surprised to find that they weren't as soft as they thought they'd be.
When we were finally done driving along the route, we headed for the bucket-return barrel and were very surprised to find out that we only had three white plastic buckets left. We had started out with 8 and somehow had managed to lose 5 of them to the animals. Oops!
The park had another little zoo area that you could walk to and see a bunch more animals, so we headed over there to check it out. I was so thankful that it had completely stopped raining and we were able to enjoy it here so much.
In the walking area they had a bunch of caged reptiles, monkeys, birds, and an adorable baby lemur. They also had a baby monkey and one of the kangaroos had a joey in his pouch (although all you could see was one leg and a tail sticking out).
Awww... a baby lemur
The one final area we went into was a bird feeding area where they had a bunch of budgies that you could feed with little popsicle sticks covered in food. A was in heaven. She absolutely loved it in there and seemed so peaceful with all those sweet little birds. I can totally see her owning one of these someday.
A's favorite one
C was quite the bird-tamer, too
K hasn't quite mastered the concept of waiting for the bird to come to you, but she did ok.
It was very difficult to get them out of the bird area and took quite some time, but we were all hungry for lunch and needed to get on the road and finally make our way out of Virginia and closer to Florida.
I found this tiny little restuarant called The Mountain View Restauarant, which had great reviews and sounded so much better than Burger King. We were the only ones in the entire restaurant so the owner came over and taught the girls how to make origami paper boats. Our food was fabulous, just like home-cooked food (real food!), and at 4pm it was just what we were hungry for.
Now we were finally on the road again and headed out of Virignia at last, since we really did need to cover some more ground. We crossed the entire state of North Carolina and squeaked just into South Carolina by only a mile or two where we stopped at a KOA in Fort Mill for the night. It was weird camping in the middle of town right next to a grocery store, and I felt kind of silly for not just looking for a campground at some cool local state park, but oh well.
I cooked some hot dogs for dinner and once again we had no campfire because even though it finally wasn't windy, it was just too darn hot (it was about 75 degrees at 8pm). One way or another we're going to burn that firewood - it's just gotta happen. We went to bed a little earlier than usual and planned to be well into Georgia by tomorrow evening.
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