Elephant Day

Wednesday we spent most of the day packing for our trip and head out the door about 8 PM. We drove through some of the night and made it through one of my least favorite parts of the trip to Florida.....Ohio at about 2. We stayed the night in Cincinatti so we could go to the Cincinatti zoo in the morning. When Liesl and I were waiting for Jim to get showered Liesl went to what I thought to be the bathroom door and I thought she opened it....when I realized that she had actually ran out of the room and was 50 yds down the hall I sprinted my bitt down there. From the time that Liesl got up in the morning until we go to the zoo I kept letting her know that she would see elephants that day so she started calling it "Elephant Day" which I think is kind of appropriate being our anniversary. I think Jim did very well in planning the zoo trip for our anniversary so we all could see elephants. It was the first thing that we saw there. Good thing it was in the front. It was kind of expensive but definately worth it. Too bad I couldnt find my zoo card because we would have gotten 50% OFF. Errrrrgh. Oh well. The zoo and botanical gardens were absoloutly beautiful. Liesl got to go into the Children's zoo where she went in and fed the farm animals with me and pet the goats and sheep. All of the exhibits were set up very aethetically. You could definately tell that it is one of the top zoos in the country. I couldnt believe I was actually more impressed with thier polar bear exibit. You could get very close to all of the animals. One exibit we were especially impressed with was the Mexican Wolves. They came right up to the glass. Liesl and Jim were hanging out in a cub cave and they were right outside like they were watching thier cubs from the front of the den. I was also especially impressed with the manatee exhibit. There was a very large aquarium indoors and they swam right by us. The Kimodo dragon exhibit, the white and black rhino exhibits, the bird exhibit.....we ran into a zookeeper meeting at the end of the exhibit and were waiting on it to end and when it did... Liesl and I almost got run over by what we thought to be a toddler which was in fact an emperor penguin that was being escorted by the zookeeper. Thier cat house was interesting, all indoors with the cats all behind glass. The gorilla exhibit brought the gorrillas very close to us as well. Liesl had a very long day and was biting my shoulder in the end...which is really bruised right now by the way but we still managed to visit the elephants again. Last night was kind of rough leaving Cincinatti as Liesl seemed to have missed her nap and also was late getting to bed again, so she was quite crazy vocal. We did manage to get her to sleep in the car finally about 9:30 and found a steak and shake hours down the road.

Today we tried a different tack to the drive. I think it was quite successful. Liesl remained happy and we got some of our shopping done at Walmart, Liesl played in the play place at Chick-fill-A and we were able to reach Orlando right out of Sea World at 1 AM. Looking forward to Sea World tomorrow. We are scheduled to be in Disney Sunday so driving went quite well.