After checking in to a rather suspect and smelly No-tell-Mo-tel in Farnham (all of the better accommodations being snapped up on account of some bike race or another), we headed for the Granby Zoo. It was a bright, sunny Saturday, so we expected crowds, but we were happy to find lots of room to roam and take in the sights of Africa.
The first stop was a small pen of meerkats, whose hilly play area featured clear plastic domes that the kids could pop their heads up inside of to stand face-to-face with the little critters. Jeremy squeezed in with Sam to give him the chance to converse with Timon ("so; where ya from?"). Next stop was the most anticipated animal of the tour: the majestic ... zebra. When surfing the web site in the planning stages of the trip, Sam showed no interest in lions and tigers and bears. He wanted to know how many zebras there were. As his smile above indicates, he wasn't disappointed. Zebras galore.
He spent some time up on Daddy's shoulders watching them eat and trot and tail swish, and then we moved on to rhinos, elephants, giraffes, gorillas, lions, flamingos, giant turtles, hippos and camels. He strollered between stops, then climbed back up to his own perch for the viewings. It was a pleasant tour, though the later stages of it were punctuated by the oft-repeated request to head for the play area they called the Jungle Training Zone. Sam heard tell of a ball pool in there.
We spent the remainder of the day in the Amusement Park. Sam ran himself ragged in the giant bouncey tents and wore a path between them and the ball pools. Then we rode the Merry Go Round (which lurched to a quicker than expected start, forcing me to kneel next to the spooked horse and cowboy and whisper them calm), the junior bumper cars (and Sam is an excellent driver, but Lightning McQueen he ain't - kept shouting out "how do I make it go slower?" -- words I will quote back to him when he has his learner's permit), and played a couple of carnival games (winning Granby, the Shark in a game of Leapfrog to the Lily Pad).
It began sprinkling near closing time, so we booked it to the car wondering if the weather would allow us to use the second day of our passes (our $190 hotel package included $120 worth of zoo tickets--enough said about the two-star accommodations!) . But the fates were on our side, and we enjoyed a beautiful morning in the unexplored areas of the zoo. Took the monorail train over the petting zoo, the tiger cages (okay, around the tiger cages), the shark tanks, the monkey cages and the bird huts. We scoped out our key stopping spots, but Sam blew right through "Le Petit Ferme" and past the playful monkeys to zero in on the play structures. The monkeyest of them all. We set up a picnic near the playground and posed as humans in their natural habitat for the train riders peering down at us :)
En route to the waterpark, we stopped to pet nurse sharks. All perfectly safe since their mouths are tucked away on their underbellies. Oh, and they were asleep. Sam leaned over the tank and noted with alarm: "One of them is cracked!!" He then learned all about gills and underwater breathing from the zoologist on site-- facts he turned around and repeated to me as flowing from the fountains of his own wisdom. Very cute.
And speaking of fountains, the Amazoo water park was a huge hit with the pool-averse boy. Expecting that he'd opt for the "calm lagoon, perfect for toddlers", he pointed instead to the cascading, spraying (comparable) mayhem of the play area -- the main feature of which is a gargantuan barrel of water that rocks as it fills with water before tipping topsy-turvey to dump its load on the swimmers below. I don't think Sam noticed that part. He did, however, scamper up on to the structure a few dozen times to whip down the slide into the water below.
If not for the low growl in the gathering clouds, we might have stayed there the whole afternoon. As it was, we barely made the Discovery Hut before the skies opened. The showers came in streamers, so we had time to pack it in and head for the car before the second downpour. Then we outran the storm, driving along the St Lawrence to Quebec City under those little white puffy clouds from the story books. Sam crashed in minutes, leaving Jeremy and I to start sketching out the plot of the best seller/ blockbuster movie that will allow us to live our summer vacation every day.
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