Hurricane Ike, A Wedding and Kansas City, Part II

After all of the wedding festivities were over, we discovered that we couldn't get back to Houston because the airports were closed due to the storm, so what did we do?!! Stay and make a vacation out of it, of course!
First of all, let me tell you what a beautiful city, Kansas City is! It actually made me slightly homesick for Illinois, where I went to high school at. It was actually feeling like fall in the air, and their were so many trees everywhere! Kind of funny to think that is what I noticed, but hey--when you're in Houston so long with humid, hot weather and concrete everywhere, you really appreciate those things! We had a ball!

Our first stop on our whirlwind KC tour was a trip to the Kansas City Zoo. Note the jacket and long-sleeves the kids were wearing. I think the weather was around 60 something that day--I was in heaven!

Here's a picture of the kids posing for us. Can you tell they are making animal faces? :) Not sure what they are pretending to be, but I'm sure it's something scary!

Let me tell you. I was so impressed with the zoo. Its so funny, because I don't think a lot of the locals think its that great, but it was really so scenic. The zoo was split up into different continents--Australia, Asia and Africa, and it was set up to resemble certain outposts in each continent (really very cute). I also loved the fact that we were able to see the animals up close and personal. In fact, a peacock was even walking around the grounds of the zoo. Here's the kids sneaking up on it. (Don't worry all you peacock lovers out there--we made sure they didn't chase it) ;)

I was also amazed that the kangaroo exhibit did not have a fence of any kind around it. The ground was also level where we were--no moat, or dugout seperating us from them. Here's the kids in front of the kangaroos. Look how open the exhibit is--really amazing!

Of course we had to take the zoo train around to all the different 'continents' in the zoo to wrap up our trip. That of course was the highlight of the trip for the kids. In addition to the train, they also had a tram, a ferry ride across the lake, and camel rides. OK, the camel rides were not really 'zoo' transportation, but I was totally bummed we missed the camel rides because the kids were getting tired. Wouldn't you have loved to see me riding a camel?! So would I! :(

Needless to say, we loved the zoo! More pics and posts of our other KC haunts in another post...