We drove up to Yucca Valley just north of Palm Springs and enjoyed a night relaxing evening with our old playgroup friends. The next day, we took the kids to The Painted Dessert (the Palm Springs zoo). The whole zoo is hot, dry weather animals and fitting for the whole area. The biggest surprise was for my future zookeeper and giraffe lover. We arrived early and went straight for the giraffes.
Little did Terra know that those there in the earliest part of the day get to feed the giraffes.
She was in heaven! It definitely made her day.
I was amazed by the number of hummingbirds around the zoo. I've never seen so many and for some reason never figured I would in a desert.
There were tons of really great cactus all over the zoo as well. Terra was amazed by all of the different kinds and became obsessed with them. Our friends sent her a baby cactus after we got home. Hopefully it's rooting in the pot okay and will continue to grow.
The zoo also had this massive small gauge train set up. They have hobbyists that set up, run and care for the train set. It has seven different lines and takes up a whole big area. They do a talk several times a day about how it works and have a scavenger hunt for the set up as well. Terra was intent on finding all 50 things on the list, plus the "engineer" put her toy lizard on one of the trains for a ride. I don't think the man gets many kids who want to know as much about the trains as Terra and the boys did. They hung in there with the other enthusiasts listening to the "tour" and asked really good questions.
Back at Michelle's house Terra continued to add to her list of animals that she wants us to have at some point. Her first mission, is for us to live somewhere where we can have chickens.
She also wants pet mice so that they can run all over her.
On our last morning, we headed out a little early to stop at the Cabazon Dinosaurs. These are some of the big life-size dinos on the side of the highway that you sometimes see in movies.
We walked around the museum to see the audio-animatronic dinosaurs, then panned for rocks, dug for fossils and finally climbed up into the T-Rex. Terra loved being in its mouth.
This was really neat, but I wish they hadn't turned a really cool dinosaur stop into a creation museum. While the basics of what they were saying fit my beliefs, for the most part anyway, they had a tendency to go overboard and some of it was pretty far-reaching for me. Terra's not big on sign reading yet so we didn't have to get into much discussion over it.
After the dinos it was time to hit the road for the airport. We made it there without much incident. (Getting lost a little doesn't count as an incident, right? I thought making a highway change would speed things up. Had I just gone straight another 200 feet I would have seen the airport. I chalk it up to having gone south out of the airport to Orange County at arrival and coming in from the desert to the west when we left.)
We had a WONDERFUL trip overall! Terra still tells me how great it was to go to
Disneyland ON her birthday. I'm so glad we made it work out after we couldn't make the trip to WDW that birthday after all and now not the next one either. Plus, thanks to my mother-in-law, I don't think the trip cost us much of anything. In the end, about the only thing out of pocket was the extra day at Disneyland so I'm really glad we added the "make up" day.
)
coming your way! I hope that Cassidy is healing up well. Good luck and safe travels to you and Abi on your move. Are you flying out or driving through?
Despite a little family issue, it was a nice time and Terra loved her presents and cake!
