Zoo stop

After a long drive down to Coldwater and doing very well through the funeral service and luncheon, we had one tired little girl. Hannah conked out as soon as we were out of the church parking lot. Since she got in a power nap, we decided to make a detour and stop at Binder Park Zoo on the way home. We've heard all kinds of great things about it from several of our friends who've been there, so we were excited to have the opportunity to check it out for ourselves.

Since we arrived a bit late in the day, it was strongly recommended that we head immediately to the Africa exhibit. I think Hannah would have been just as happy to ride the tram all day(must take after her daddy), but eventually we had to get off when we arrived in Africa.

Hannah and Mama having fun on the tram

Once getting our bearings, we headed out into the African wilderness where we came upon a large crowd of...people. It was a pile of madness! Hannah and I managed to work our way closer to the source of the excitement and discovered that we were at the giraffe feeding area. There were just too many people battling to get to the front, so we skipped out on feeding the giraffes ourselves and instead enjoyed a great view of them, and all of those crazy people, just a few feet down.

I must admit, they were pretty neat.

The set-up of this zoo is much different than John Ball Zoo here in Grand Rapids. The animals have much larger areas to roam, which is great for them, but makes viewing them a bit more difficult. We did enjoy all of the trails to walk, though. We certainly got our exercise in for the day. They also had a nice children's area of the zoo, where little ones could get up and close with the animals. Hannah was quite popular with the goats in the petting area, but she wasn't so sure about all of the attention she was getting.

Good thing Daddy was there to keep Hannah safe from the curious goats.

These are definitely well fed goats.

Hannah seemed to much prefer viewing the animals from the other side of the fence.