A walk on the WILD side.

Our family decided to check out the new Tanganyika Wildlife Park last Sunday...we were very impressed! It's a smaller park, so we easily covered all the exhibits in two hours. Everything was VERY clean and family friendly. There were 5 or 6 feeding stations where you could get up close and personal with the animals and feed them--Carter was all over that!

The first thing you see when you enter the park are the giraffes...it's like you're walking right into their kingdom. This is one of the feeding stations, but they rarely come over to eat in the afternoons, so we missed out on that.

Our second stop was the ring-tailed lemurs. Most of them were napping when we stopped by, but there were a couple awake and ready to eat a cranberry right out of Carter's hand! At first he kept tossing the berry at them, but he finally got brave enough to hold out his palm to them. Next we saw the white bengal tigers. Carter was so excited to feed them too, but thankfully this was NOT one of the feeding stations :).Then we moved to the lories (Australian parrots). You can walk into a large caged area and you're surrounded by all these beautiful, colorful birds. You could buy a little cup of juice and they come drink it right out of your hand! As we left the lories, a park employee walked by holding this guy, named Earl. She asked if we wanted to hold him--Carter quickly told her NO and hid behind us. He was kind of an ugly dude...

We walked by the kangaroos, but they were being pretty lazy...not much action over there.

Things livened up when we visited the bunnies and tortoises, who both eat lettuce leaves. Carter was thrilled about the bunnies and got right down to pet them--he was giggling the whole time they were eating his lettuce leaf.Now the turtles were a different story. They aren't as soft and cuddly and Carter didn't care for them crawling all over his feet. Actually, he didn't even want to be in the corral with them. He let mommy and daddy do the feeding this time.

They have a beautiful water feature in the middle of the park and we had to stop for a few photo-ops.They also have a little petting zoo with goats, a donkey, a llama and a camel. More feeding fun for Carter!

Nearby, they had a big camel you could ride on. Mr. Independent thought he was big enough to ride on it all by himself, so we gave it a shot. He looks so tiny on that huge animal! He was very focused the whole ride.

Carter's favorite part of the whole day could have been the HUGE playground they had! It was a 3-story tree house with a massive tunnel slide. He immediately bypassed the smaller slides and headed straight for the big one. He flew down the slide, jumped off and sprinted for the stairs to try it again. I think he made about 25 laps...he was a little sweaty by that point.

What on earth could we use to lure a 2-year old away from the coolest playground ever?? Ice cream, of course! These people were smart--they had a Dippin' Dots stand right next to the playground.

Our sweaty, sun-kissed boys.

What a fun afternoon! One more picture on the way out of the park...mommy and her boys.