The very cool zoo in Austin!

When telling us about the Austin Zoo yesterday, Sabrina described it rather apologetically as an animal refuge ~ not a "regular" kind of zoo ~ afterall, this zoo was in Austin and the theme of this city is: "Keep Austin Weird!" It had been a little while since Sabrina had been out to this zoo and I think she was worried we wouldn't like it. Hey, we're from Grand Rapids; and in my opinion, the John Ball Zoo is one of THE MOST PATHETIC zoos I have ever been to ...
We were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Austin Zoo. The zoo is about a 15-minute drive from Sabrina's new house, and it is smack dab in the middle of nowhere really ... along remote winding roads and then suddenly ~ the zoo! Mr. Jones and I took so many pictures it was really hard to narrow them down ... it's just that you can get SO close to the animals here! I believe the monkey pictured above is the Ring-Tailed Lemur (but I'm not positive).
This is the Leopard Tortoise ~ isn't he cool? He is HUGE! I'm going to have to gather all of the animal/zoo pictures I have in my computer photo collection and make a book ~ perhaps an alphabet book ~ and mail a copy to each family for the kiddos to enjoy!
Look how close you can get to the BIG cats! There were signs everywhere warning NOT to reach over and TOUCH these lovely critters ... the sign said that anything with teethh could just POSSIBLY bite! Ouch!
There were a lot of exotic birds in cages ~ talking kinds of birds ~ absolutely beautiful to look at!

I think the macaws were having a conversation with Karis ... she was quite intrigued to hear a bird say, "Mommy," "Good-by," and a whole bunch of other stuff.

This bear was SO cute. Sabrina and I wanted to take her home to cuddle with ... she was posing for pictures perfectly!
Look how close we got to get to her! It was hard to resist just one little tiny touch of her fur!
Karis wasn't too sure about this HUGE creature and preferred to stay in her mama's arms ...

The barn area was very nicely kept and the goats and sheep were very people-friendly ... especially if you had food for them (which we did not) ...
This is a good-looking llama, wouldn't you agree? I never trust getting too near them, so I just used the ole zoom on her ...
And these little pot-bellied pigs were SO adorable ... I wished so badly that my Emma Joy could see them ~ her favorite animal is the PIG.
There were hens and roosters roaming all over the place ... I like this picture of Grandpa Jones, Karis and Jackson ...
Jackson enjoyed watching the huge tortoises ... they seemed to enjoy him too!
Karis thought they were cool too ... there were tons of children at the zoo today, but it was never crowded! I like how they have it laid out so that everyone can get a good look at all of the animals.
These birds were talking to each other and to us ...
There were a couple of nice-looking wolves in this area ... Karis wasn't real sure about them either!
Jackson liked the big cats a lot and at one point growled at them ... and then one of them opened WIDE its mouth revealing a nice long row of really huge teeth ... I don't think Jackson growled after that ...

It was a breezy, cool, kind of misty morning with a little bit of drizzle mixed in ~ but we stayed and visited with the animals for almost two hours today ...
This is Grandpa Jones' shot of the Jaguars ... beautiful!
The black one reminded me of Thomas K, giant-sized ... I wonder what Tommy would do if he met one of these guys?
And isn't the cougar so majestic-looking? I love her pose here! I'm not kidding, we have tons of great pictures from our day today! I'm going to just have to make that book ...
Another wonderful thing about this zoo is that is wasn't expensive. PLUS, the gift shop there had very reasonably priced momentos ~ nice puzzles, stuffed animals, animal mugs, etc. We picked up a few small surprises for each of the eight grandchildren and had such fun doing it!

It's nearly midnight (again) and I really need to catch some sleep. We did other stuff than the zoo today like playing with the children, and grandpa made homemade bread to go with our dinner tonight. I took a really nice long walk while the little ones were napping today and looked all around the neighborhood ~ beautiful! We had a very pleasant day of it and are just as thankful as we can be! :)