November 8, 2009

Some days you should just go back to bed and start over. We woke up excited and ready for a fun family day. We'd convinced Ken to take the day off to play and go to Fossil Rim, the wild animal park about 90 miles south of us. We had a nice trip down with a brief stop at Einstein Bagel's for breakfast. That was a bad move. Well, really only a bad move if you wanted to actually move. We had the misfortune to enter the bagel store just as a running club showed up to refuel after their morning run. Wow, what a wait! We finally re-entered the car with our pumpkin bagels, and continued on our way.


We made it the almost 2 hours to Fossil Rim, with 2 content girls. Teresa played with her tag reader the whole way. Addison played with the singing caterpillar and Lulu the ABC spider. Peaceful drive...in a noisy, toddler sort of way.


We were so excited to get to the animal park. The girls were especially excited to be allowed to get out of their car seats while the car was moving. Teresa quickly stated, "This is my favorite part, hanging out the window!"

We skipped by the ostriches, who've been known to be pretty aggressive with us, and moved on to the blackbucks, who have cool curly horns.

We had just gotten past the blackbucks when our engine light came on that the car was overheating. Not good, especially when you're in the middle of a bunch of wild animals and can't get out of your car. And all your food for your picnic lunch is in your trunk. And you have kids who feel strongly about eating. Sigh. So, we illegally backed up all the way to the entrance of the park and pulled back into the parking lot. Nobody was excited about being back in the parking lot. I did convince Addison to walk over with me to look at the buffaloes.

After the buffaloes we headed back to the car. Seems that it's still excited to be in a car as long as you're not bound by a car seat.

We sat and waited, and waited, and waited for the car to cool down. We ate our picnic lunch. We listened to Ken call every mechanic, auto service store in a 30 mile radius. No one's open on Sunday. We finally were able to drive the car about 4 miles to get to Dairy Queen, sort of lessening the disappointing blow that we would not be going to feed any animals today. We were finally able to link up with a tow truck that came to tow our car to the nearest Chrysler dealership. The girls were less excited than I thought about seeing a tow truck up close. Teresa just kept saying, "I wish our car didn't need to be towed." If only she could realize how much we realized that we felt strongly that way also.

So, we hung out at Dairy Queen for almost 3 hours waiting for our ride to come pick us up. We certainly owe our neighbor, Ms. Angie for this one! Thankfully, Dairy Queen had a little play area, which kept the girls pretty well occupied the whole time we were there.

The girls did finally get tired, several hours past their nap time, and eventually came over to rest on Ken.

They got caught up in a hug and tickle fest, so silly when they both really get going giggling.

Not at all the day I'd planned. I guess our silver lining, our car's still in Glen Rose, TX. So, perhaps when we got down to get it we'll be able to go through Fossil Rim then.