Day at the zoo...

Welcome to the Tyler, TX, zoo. I'm a bit of a loner, so I was looking forward to a day of solitude wondering through the zoo at my own pace, but I actually made friends with some other wives (okay, so I got ambushed and absorbed into the group) and had an even better time wandering around at someone else's pace! I must say, the day was not what I expected.

I was enjoying looking at the flamingos when we first arrived. The other ladies, however, had found a very large, red, furry ant to inspect. On the sidewalk. By the way, I looked up that ant on the Internet this morning, and it turns out that it's a red velvet ant, also known as a cow ant. It's really a wasp with a sting that is said to be painful enough to kill a cow. Good thing none of the ladies poked it.

The ladies then became absorbed with looking at a blue tailed lizard on the sidewalk. I found this little guy up on one of the exhibit signs.

When I drew the ladies' attention to my lizard, it hopped up onto Lisa's hand. Where it posed for us before it began to climb. And climb. And climb.

Lisa was quite happy to have her little rider until it zipped up her arm and around the back of her neck where it headed straight for the inside of her shirt! I rescued her and returned the little fellow where he belonged.

Well, when we finally stopped browsing the sidewalks and started looking at the actual exhibits, we found three rhinos locked in their inside pens. I'm not sure why they weren't outside, but this fellow wasn't happy. He paced around a lot until he finally turned his back on us and sprayed directly at one of our ladies! She managed to scuttle out of the way, but it was a close call! We did learn not to hang around an unhappy rhino!! : )

The zoo is not large, but most of the displays were nice. Since most of the animals had large, natural habitats, we weren't really close enough for pictures. I tried to get a photo of the anteaters, but they kept moving too fast. With our dry weather, I would have loved to have taken these guys home with me. We have been overrun with ants this summer - especially on our new patio!

Two of the zoo's many macaws. I usually hate to see parrots in a zoo (I used to raise birds, and I hate to see them confined), but all of the macaws were on perches outside of cages. I felt better about that.

And it wouldn't be a Texas zoo without longhorns!

Mom and the cats are not missing me. Mom is spending her time reclining in the sunroom with a good book. The cats are being cats. They love whoever has access to the cat food. *Sigh* In fact, the day we left, we got what was by all reports a very good rain at our house. That would be the first measurable rain for over a month. We may need to stay away just to break the drought!

Well, I'm off to the planetarium in an hour, so I'd better get ready to go. I'm meeting my new friends. Most of us plan to skip the water park tomorrow in favor of doing our own things, so I'll be hitting the quilt shop then. I'm counting the hours!

'Til later,

Debbi