Florida - Friday April 28th

It was a rough night with Kendra waking up at 1:45 am and really confused as to where she was and she just didn’t want to be put back down again. Jamie ended up sleeping on the floor with her on the hard carpet and then there were all the noises in the morning of people walking by and doors closing.

We took our time this morning and Chris and Patti buzzed us on the walkie talkie to tell us about breakfast (I totally forgot about the continental breakfast). We meet them downstairs for quite the selection of breakfast stuff (cereal, waffles, english muffins, danishes, bananas). We decided to get going to the Lowry Park Zoo after breakfast.

We got there and to our surprise there was free parking and full of school aged kids. We had a blast walking around looking at the different animals. There were many different native birds shown with a few being almost extinct, manitees, fish, a African area with a giraffe feeding area (he liked my hand with his long tongue – it went all the way around the bottom and around the top again), a baby elephant, monkeys, petting zoo, feed the stingrays, there was a kimoto dragon there too.

There was section dedicated to Austrailian animals (although a llama is not very austrailian). Chris was enjoying himself singing to the songs they were playing through the speakers. We had lunch there before heading to the monkeys section before we headed home.

As we walked around we saw this guy with a huge lens on a tripod. Patti was so envious (she just got her new Nikon) and wanted that lens. Well it turned out that we saw him again stopping at the same exhibit that we were and Patti said something to the guy. Some how it ended up that he had a Nikon camera too and he put her body onto his huge lens to take a picture of the monkey that was at the end his pen about 15 m from us. We all got to look through the lens and that you could see the nose hairs on that monkey he was so close in that lens. Apparently, he was working on behalf of an organization that helps kids with Autism. Patti couldn’t stop talking about it for about 10 minutes after that and she showed us the pictures that she took with the enormous lens. Jamie got a picture of her looking through her camera and the just pure joy on her face was amazing.

We got a picture with all of us at the front of the zoo before heading out. We stopped at Target on the way home (with Kendra only getting a 10 minute nap in the car at this point). We replaced the hat and the sunglasses we lost at the zoo and got some other stuff that we wanted to get for the beach in Sanibel Island (we head there tomorrow).

Kendra then had an hour nap while Micah and Jamie went swimming again and then Patti and I headed out to the grocery store to get some dinner and lunch for tomorrow (so much cheaper and way better for you then all the grease that we have had in the last little while).

We had dinner in our rooms after making the buns and such and then got Kendra in bed by 8 pm and all we in bed by 9:30 after a long day out.