Mother and Son Outing

I had to ship my laptop off for work last Thursday afternoon.  Since it's a wee bit tough to do work without one's work laptop, I decided to take a Mother and Son outing last Friday.  Atticus and I decided to visit the Audubon Zoo.  According to the weather, it was supposed to be cloudy in the morning with rain and thunderstorms in the afternoon.

We arrived at the zoo just after 10 am (with the tickets that I printed at home) and it started to drizzle.  Atticus had chosen to wear his swimsuit to the zoo in case we made it to Cool Zoo.  The rain wasn't enough to deter us -- so we started for the front gates.  There were several school buses unloading kids and I asked an employee where to go if we had already printed our tickets.  He pointed us in a direction and then we just waltzed right into the zoo.  No one checked our tickets???  Atti and I wandered around - we saw elephants, we tossed pennies into the fountain, we started off towards other exhibits.  The rain started to pick up a bit so we ducked into the Dinosaur gift shop to purchase a couple of rain ponchos.  The really nice employee there gave me the 10% member discount too even though I told her we weren't members yet!  Nice.  I'll take the $1 savings, sure!!  The purchase was more for me since I had the iPhone in my pocket and didn't want it getting wet!!  Atticus only wore his poncho for a little bit...  It was close to the dinosaurs that we caught our first glimpse of the "blue train".  We tried chasing the train for a bit and someone riding told us where to catch it.  By now, it was time to take a break from the bears, zebras, rhinos etc and grab some lunch.  Inside the restaurant, I grabbed a few things and took my tray over to the employee to pay.  The employee rung up our bottle of water, the bottle of apple juice and $1 for our small tray of french fries.  She didn't charge me for our pizza or cheeseburger!  Ummm, ok?!?  By this point, I'm starting to think - either this is my lucky day, or something really weird is going on!!  So, now we're fed and on our way to find the train depot we found the Cool Zoo and the Carousel.  We watched the water park for a bit - but it was completely empty - go figure, it was still drizzling rain!!!  Atticus wanted to ride the carousel and since it was his day, we went for it.  We bought our ticket and climbed onto a big green alligator.  He had a blast.  Next up was getting tickets for the train (which we found out wasn't leaving for another 15 minutes or so...).  While waiting for the train, we wandered over and watched some monkeys.  Awesome!  Then the train arrived.  Atticus was thrilled.  We actually rode the train all around the zoo just over two times.  The driver, Devin, was so nice to Atticus and let him sit up front for a bit and toot the train whistle and ring the bell.  The train and all of the golf carts may have actually trumped seeing all the animals.

By now it was raining pretty hard and we decided to call it a day.  We had seen almost all of the zoo at this point.  We missed the Louisiana Swamp -- so we'll have to do that next time, but I think we saw most everything else!  It was a tiring day, but lots of fun.  We'll definitely have to do it again.