SOCIAL MEDIA

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

A Trip to the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines & Mini-Vacation

Every year around my birthday time we go to Des Moines to go shopping. I miss having local access to a lot of my favorite stores and the good selection that you can find in a bigger city. Oh, and there’s a Cheesecake factory. Enough said.

Little Miss Sunshine loves animals. Most of the books we have are about animals and she loves to see all of the farm animals at grampy and grammy’s farm. I knew she would absolutely love going to the zoo—so we made plans to do that!

Des Moines Trip September 2015 002

This was my first visit to the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines but hubby had been there on field trips are a child. It’s the perfect size zoo—it took us about 2 hours to walk through which was the perfect amount of time for a one year old. Although we didn’t go through the indoor Discovery Center. She was getting tired and cranky towards the end.

Des Moines Trip September 2015 006

We took a train ride through the zoo, which cost less than $5 for all three of us. Overall, everything was very reasonably priced. Admission was $12 each and Little Miss Sunshine was free (as are children 2 years old and younger).

train ride

Aren’t Little Miss Sunshine’s sunglasses adorable? She actually kept them on most of the time!

She really did love the zoo! She would get so excited to see the different animals. She thought anything furry was a cat and would meow, of course.

How brave this child is never ceases to amaze me. She isn’t afraid of much of anything—although she didn’t want to touch this llama.

Petting Zoo

There was a nice playground located in the Kids’ Kingdom. Little Miss Sunshine was a little too young to use the equipment, but we did find this cow to take a quick picture with!

Zoo outing

It was so fun to see her look at the animals with wonder. It’s like being able to relive childhood through the eyes of my child.

Wonder

Look at those horns

Giraffe

We really needed to go on a vacation and just spend a little time together as a family with no interruptions or real responsibilities. We really enjoyed it!

Baby & Daddy

By far, Little Miss Sunshine loved the carousel the most. She cried and cried when the ride was over and we had to get off!

carousel

Carousel at zoo

Such a beautiful carousel!

I had some record breaking steps earned on my Fitbit over the weekend! On this particular day (Friday), I earned 13,396 steps—which was a personal record at the time, but I blew that out of the water on Saturday with 17,043 steps! Whoohoo!

I earned the Urban Boot badge on Fitbit. It has been a long time since I’ve earned a badge—so that made me happy!

image

On Saturday, we started our day out with a walk at Gray’s Lake Park—a beautiful spot for a walk!

IMG_3592

The rest of the trip was filled with shopping (mostly just walking around malls), swimming at the hotel pool, Starbucks, and good eats…maybe too many of those!

I can’t wait to take our next mini vacation!

 

What’s your favorite vacation spot for a quick getaway?

No comments :

Post a Comment

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...