The Fab Four: Fort Worth Zoo

We drove out to Arlington on Thursday morning to stay in a house and hang out down there before the BYU football game on Friday night. It was about a 5 hour drive. It was a fun drive being able to see much more of Texas. We also would have gotten there sooner but we stopped at Buc-cee's on the way out and spent about half hour to 40 mins inside. Tammy and Craig always stop at this gas station when they head out in that direction because it is so nice and have super clean bathrooms. First off, it is quite big. There were 38 pumps outside. We were greeted with samples as we entered inside, yes samples. Bailey was in heaven because it was a sample of jalapeno cheddar summer sausage. And she ended up "robbing" the samples because she loved it so much and the lady let her take as much as she wanted. The bathrooms are in sane, so big and so clean and sanitary. I know it sounds funny but they are impressive. Then there is the rest of the convenient store. It is huge. There is a deli where you can order made to order sandwiches which we did and it was so good! They have a huge selection of jerky that you can buy by the pound. Which again we bought and the spicy teriyaki was yummy! We enjoyed samples at the homemade fudge station, and loaded up on Beaver Nuggets. Caleb LOVES these and would get a full bag if we let him. They are a kind of a mix between corn pops and carmel popcorn. They are so good and so addicting. We had to laugh because we spent more inside then we did on gas filling up our rental. We headed back on the road and got to the house around 6. Tommy and Craig headed out to the store to get stuff for dinner. We hung out for a while before heading to bed.

Friday morning we woke up and all got ready. We decided to hit up the Fort Worth Zoo before heading out to the BYU game that night. I am so glad we did!!! It was such an awesome zoo!!! We were there for 5 hours and still missed a few exhibits. We LOVED how every exhibit was surrounded by trees, bamboos, bushes etc. You felt like you were in their territory and not that they were caged up. We hit the monkeys first and we walked up at the perfect time. They had a fun little wood bar play area and one of the monkeys took off and just started swinging from one bar to the next, over and over again. He had a little "routine" down, it was so fun to watch him and he was going pretty fast. The kids loved seeing this, as did we. We walked around for a little while longer but we were all hungry so we stopped for lunch. We chose the Crocodile Cafe and had Burger King. We were going to sit outside until we went inside and saw that they had huge windows where you could see all the crocodiles, snapping turtles and fish. The kids LOVED this and it was almost hard to get them to eat they were so interested in watching them all. We spent the next several hours walking around taking it all in. They had a fun little Town inside the zoo that had restaurants, candy stores, games, a play area etc. It was so cool. It looked like an old western town. We let the kids play for a little while before seeing more animals. Caleb was extra excited that they had sharks at this zoo. We also went inside an exhibit that let the kids feel starfish and other living sea creatures. I think the highlight for us all was the bird exhibit. You could buy a popsicle stick that had bird food on it and walk inside to feed them. The hogle zoo had an exhibit like this years ago but it was much much smaller and my kids never experienced it. There were birds everywhere and many of them flew into our shirts and purses. We spent a good half hour inside. There were over 10,000 different birds inside the area we were in. It was awesome!!! This zoo was so much fun. I loved how many of the exhibits had waterfalls and the animals had so much space to roam. It was just a beautiful zoo and so big! I am so glad that we checked it out. The kids were all so good and were having a blast! In fact they weren't ready to leave but we had to head out to have time to get to the game.

Sorry for all the pictures but I want everything documented and I did not post them all :)