Along with some DVDs and games and things, he got a new fleece:
We went to Longleat, which is a stately home with a drive-through animal park on its grounds. I'd never been and Mark hadn't visited since he was a kid. It's in Wiltshire county, about an hour from where we live. It's owned by the Marquess of Bath, who is a crazy guy, and we actually saw him walking into his house, wearing slippers and crazy neon patterned pants, followed by his seemingly long-suffering dog. The dog had a Gromit look about him - kind of humoring his wacky owner.
Anyway, the safari is featured on a BBC TV show, and it has lots of different animals there. The monkey area was closed though, because of an outbreak of simian herpes. The weird thing there is that only one monkey is infected, and they can't figure out how a monkey could have managed that on its own. I didn't mind because I'm not a big fan any way, and they're notorious for damaging people's cars.
Here's the first part of the park, where you can get out of your car to look at some giraffes and things:
Our favorite moment of the day probably turned out to be this giraffe which chased a rabbit around for a while:
We couldn't work out what the giraffe wanted, and it seemed the rabbit couldn't either. It kept stopping to eat but then moving along just as soon as the giraffe got close.Our batteries ran out part way through the day, so I took a lot of pictures on my phone, but I haven't been able to get them off onto the computer yet. So here's one we took before the batteries went dead:
Besides the animals, you can tour the house, which is old, and there are lots of activities on the grounds, including this maze:
The maze was hard, and we never made it into the center, which I think was the objective. Mark would have made it, I'm sure, but we accidentally got separated, which meant that he had an unhappy, lost wife with a cell phone to deal with, so we exited before completing it.
Despite that, we had fun!
5 comments:
Yea pics - they are great.....living in england make for interesting birthday activities..
i like mark's fleece....
it looks like you have inherited your dad's battery gene....
thanks for the blog post....mom
Don't all the safari animals get cold during the winter?
Maybe the rabbit and the giraffe are playing chase, and the rabbit just had to slow WAY down so the giraffe could see him...
Yes, we live over here purely for the entertainment options.
Yes, the giraffe was managing to walk while keeping its head low to the ground - I thought it was really impressive. I would have definitely fallen over...
Oh, and the safari park does close for the winter. It actually closed only a couple of weeks after we were there.
I think they have cozy huts for them to hang out in during the winter.
Maybe there was a shortage of rabbit-shaped tree leaves that day??
That maze looks a good bit more daunting than the corn maze in Anderson!
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