Tallahassee Museum

We are back home in New Plymouth now, and after 16 hours of sleep our first night back, we are (amazingly) still tired, but coping well. We are thankful to have a weekend to rest and recuperate before heading back to work on Monday, and thankful for our entire trip, which was filled with many good times with friends and family.

Before I get back to Kiwi adventures, I still have some pictures from our trip, and I've decided that they're much too fun not to share, so... I'm going to share them.

The following pictures are from our visit with J's dad, Mike, in Tallahassee, Florida. We spent two wonderful days there with him, doing all kinds of fun things, and enjoying getting to catch up as well. 

We went to the Tallahassee Museum, to which Mike took J when he was a kid, so it was fun for me to get to see it as well. Plus, it was just a great place!

The zoo part of the museum is in this beautiful wetlands, which we loved wandering through.

This is a Florida panther. I thought it was so fierce and beautiful, I bought a postcard of it to send to my kids at kindergarten. (I hope it actually made it to them).

 This little duck seemed to have drifted off to sleep while taking a drink of water, which is pretty darn adorable.

There was an otter habitat, and I was so excited, because I love otters. But then we couldn't see them, and I had just started to feel disappointed when Mike pointed out a guy who was walking past and said that he'd worked at the museum for a long time. When Mike said hi, they guy came over and started chatting about the otters, and then called them by name, and they came running right out! Apparently, he had raised one of the, and it still loves him and will crawl right into his lap. It was so amazing, and I was delighted to get to watch the otters. Good thing we came with someone who knew the place!

We got to see a big, black bear. I thought it was surprising cute for being the size of a small car.

We also got to see quite a few different dinosaurs (and other prehistoric animals that look like dinosaurs but aren't) made out of car parts. They were phenomenal.

The museum also included a very interesting area that is set up like an old-fashioned farm, which was fun and informative. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures in that area, but we enjoyed it.