August 7, 2013

Today was amazing. We all loaded up into the mini bus, including birthday girl, Sophie, and three of her friends, the other Lockyers, Colin and the MGAA team.

We went to Longleat – safari park and animal adventure. We started in the animal kingdom. We got to walk through areas with anteaters, weird birds, meerkats, red pandas, stingrays, porcupines, otters, tortoises, and more. Then we went through the penguin sanitary, the butterfly house, the bat cave, and tiny monkeys. They had ropes that ran over our heads to play on. And a lot of the animals could walk back and forth through the people path. The meerkats were very active and ran back and forth through our feet.

Then we hoped into a boat and toured the river. There were hippos and sea lions in the water. Megan got to feed the sea lions and Annie loved the baby sea lion. We also floated past a few gorilla islands.

We also road a little train around looking at more animals. Then we headed to the mini bus to do the safari part of the park.

We drove to the entrance and there was an area to park and go see the giraffes. They were amazing. Then we walked through the wallaby exhibit followed by the Lemur display.

A lot of the exhibits were open so you were with the animals. And there was staff all over to explain things.

Then we loaded back into the bus and started down the road and through the gates. It felt a little like Jurassic Park.

First we saw the rhinos which I though were flipping fantastic. There were all kinds of gazelle, wilder beasts, zebra, African cows and antelope. Colin was particularly excited about the tapirs.

We eventually drove through lion, tiger and cheetah sections.

I think all of us agree that the monkey part was the best. They climbed all over the cars, pulling off antennas, and going for rides. It was too cool. We had a couple monkeys riding on our roof and a few on our windshield. We saw the monkeys in the car behind us rip off its weather stripping, and a few monkeys with car parts in their mouth.

It was a really fantastic day.

We stopped at a pub called the Old Beams Inn for dinner. Yum.