First Anniversary Celebrations – Part 1

Scott and I have taken off several days to celebrate our first anniversary. Even though we aren’t really traveling anywhere for this vacation, we’re still having a great time. On our first day off, Thursday, we slept in (and by that I mean our dog Poe let us sleep in past our normal wake up time of 5:50 am and we rested until 7ish). I fought a migraine, sadly, and took a few hours in the morning to recover from attempting to take a migraine stopper (aka some medicine pill thing) which actually made my head feel worse and KO’d me on the bed.

We played Everquest together in the morning/afternoon and then we took out our brand-spankin-new tennis rackets to the apartment tennis court. I haven’t played tennis in many, many years and was never very good at it to begin with. The other day, while at Walmart, I was picking up items to make our inherited bikes* [see footnote] look better and saw tennis rackets on the shelf and thought “Well, that’s one more thing we can do on our vacation for relatively cheap”.

It took me a while to get the stroke down – it was as if I was trying to do a softball and golf swing all at once and it wasn’t pretty. Also, since I haven’t done much exercise at all since before our wedding (when I was trying to stay the same size but maybe get a little muscle on my arms since my dress was strapless), running after the tennis ball was a little slow. But, I got a good work out! Arms and legs certainly felt a bit sore the next day. And I got some much needed sun. I boast that I have vampire-pale skin, but sometimes it just looks unattractive. Sun is also good for the body: emotions, vitamins, etc. I should get out more!

Friday Scott and I went to the Indianapolis Zoo. Neither one of us enjoys driving in the city, but I think I’m a bit more comfortable so I drove. We used my iphone’s gps app to get us there even though the drive seemed easy enough. I’m glad I took the gps because driving in the city is tricky! We saw one car change lanes on top of another car – I guess they thought it was a demolition derby and wanted to side-swipe their opponent – the car in the other lane swerved and nearly hit the curb. Luckily no one actually crashed. Shortly after we witnessed someone go straight through a turn lane on our left and end up in the incoming traffic turn lane which was boxed in by large curbs. I assume they had to back their way out to get back into the correct flow of traffic.

When we finally did arrive to the Indy Zoo we found that 87% of Indiana’s Elementary Schools were present. I’ve never seen so many children in one place *shudder*. It was like weaving in and out of hungry ant piles – noisy, rude, grumpy, sniffing, sneezing, crying, hungry ant piles. Still, we were able to enjoy the Zoo. Our plan was to go to the FAR end first, hoping not as many people would be there, and then loop back to the beginning after 2:00ish because I was betting most of the school buses would need to head back to get the kids back in time for the end of the day. I was right! We were able to see the second half of the zoo in peace and revisited a few areas just before we left with nearly no one around. It was like a private zoo and that was lovely.

For lunch we had stopped at Marsh on the way and grabbed fresh fruit (pineapple, strawberries, grapes), cans of ice tea (Southern Sweet for me, Arnold Palmer for Scott), and sandwiches (chicken salad on a croissant for me, roastbeef sandwich for Scott). My parents had given us an old cooler to bring back our frozen wedding cake top and told us to keep it. It came in handy! We left the Zoo and sat in my car’s trunk – yes, you read that right – and had our late afternoon meal. We were NOT going to pay the exorbitant prices inside the zoo. And it was a bit like having a picnic, but without the picnic table or bench….

I took a ton of photos. I never realized how hard it was to take good pictures 1)With people/kids bumping into you and stepping on your toes or knocking your camera into your forehead as you held it to your eye 2)Of moving, unpredictable animals through smeared glass or low-light conditions 3)Through fencing or where animals were hiding in hard to reach areas. So, I took 400 shots hoping at least one of each creature came out presentable. I’m happy to say it worked. Now, a 30% success rate is nothing to write to the photographers guild about, but I have a few shots I’m rather proud of and of course I’ll be sharing a few here.

I think my top five things at the zoo were 5)The walkways with shade and plenty of plants 4)The variety from ocean to desert and birds to elephants. 3)The dolphin show. There’s that Hootie and the Blowfish song were the line goes “And dolphins make me cry”. Yeah. That was me. They are such amazing creatures and seem so loving and playful. *sigh* 2) The tigers. It must have been feeding time as they were prowling very close to the glass windows, back and forth, letting me attempt to get some close-ups of them. 1) The giraffes. Because they had a feeding zone I was able to get close ups of the giraffes that were just too amazing.

Of course I had to stop at the gift shop. I would have bought more if it weren’t so darn expensive! I did decide, after 30 minutes of wandering around (poor Scott, but he’s such a trooper to put up with me. ha!), on a Giraffe snow globe. Though it’s more like a confetti globe as the pieces aren’t white. I tend to collect water globes/snow globes/confetti globes. This makes #7 in my slowly growing collection.

We were tired after a long day. Thanks to Scott’s family for watching our Poe so he didn’t have to stay caged up for such a long time!

More fun to come. Enjoy some pictures below.

*Inherited bikes. A longer story than will be included here, but there will be another blog post about that shortly.

 

Giraffe Raspberry Postcard

 

Flamingo Fight

Polar bear cave

Giraffe Stare Down

Tiger on the prowl

Elephant baby bath time

Cheetah glare

Walrus swim

Elephant walk

I am the Walrus...

See more here: Zoo Gallery

 

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