To the Zoo!

For the last few weeks Jack has been begging to go see the Spider Monkeys and go down their slide so this weekend we obliged. We loaded the kids into the car and headed to Boise.

As usual when we got there is was around lunchtime. We learned the hard way with Jack that if it is even within an hour or two of lunch that we should eat BEFORE we hit the zoo. Trust me if the kids don’t have full tanks before entering the gates there is a good chance your trip to the Zoo will go south in a hurry. That said we made our obligatory stop at Cabela’s (They have nice clean restrooms, free fudge samples, and fish viewing…what more can you ask for?) grabbed some food from Café Rio and headed to the MK Nature Center.

“Nature Center? But I thought you were headed to the Zoo?,” you say.

Well we have a bit of a tradition of parking at the MK Center (much less crowded), looking through the gardens there and then walking the 1.5 miles to the Zoo on the Boise River greenbelt. It’s worth it for sure! Plus, we got to have a nice picnic on the river for lunch.

 

After lunch we hoofed it down to the Zoo. Summer means all the animals are out on display and there are a lot of things to see. The new Sloth Bear exhibit was open and looks really nice. At the Wallaby Walkabout the wallaby joey popped out of its pouch for a few minutes and we got a good look. The Spider Monkeys were having a snack we we stopped by. Watching a Spider Monkey run around its enclosure waving a gallon milk jug of treats from each hand is quite entertaining. Much to Jack’s delight there was a “Pork-u-pine” out sunning in a tree. Even Emilie had a blast playing in some of the ‘kid friendly’ exhibit areas. The petting zoo goats were her favorite.

Best yet, is that summer means the butterflies are back! During the warm months only the Zoo sports a butterfly garden with butterflies brought in from Costa Rica. Jack has a fascination with butterflies (an moths) and when we asked if he wanted to see them he said YES!! We waited until the end to go through the exhibit (it’s the kind you can walk through) and Jack kept talking about seeing the butterflies from the time we got through the gate until he was allowed into the butterfly pen. Of course once the first one landed on him his eyes got HUGE, he shook it off, and was ready to go….. There was a bit of a line though so he was a trooper and stuck it out without fussing. Once we were out of the pen he was ready to go back in of course….3 year olds, what can you do?

I myself managed to take some good shots of the butterflies. Now I just have to figure out if one is good enough for the fair.

 

 

 

Once we were done at the Zoo we walked the 1.5 miles back to the nature center. As usual neither kid made it back awake…