This past weekend, we took advantage of one of the only Saturdays Mary has off of orchestra this academic year to take a family day trip, visiting the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro for the first time.
I grew up with a zoo twenty minutes from home, so it has felt lacking to be in a major city without any zoo at all. Our choices are the zoo an hour south in Columbia, SC, which is smaller and more manageable but is a more traditionally "cagey" zoo or the NC zoo nearly two hours north, which is a more daunting zoo to manage, containing about five miles of walking paths stretched out in a line instead of in a loop, but has the benefit of having huge, naturalized outdoor enclosures and showcasing three continents of animals.
It's hard getting a large family on the road for travel for both pragmatic and relational issues, and I'll leave it at that. We persevered, made it, and the day trip ended up being a boon to our family and created positive memories.
Note that this zoo struck me as being low in its safeguards, especially for a family of children who climb everything. I walked past many enclosures where I thought a kid could take about four seconds to hop a fence and then just be in the pit with the alligators or whatever else deadly creature.
Recommendation: We purchased the audio CD of "Bud and Me: The True Adventure of the Abernathy Boys" and saved it for these four hours in the car. We're not quite done, but so far it is fantastic and family-friendly. Read this article to learn of these boys, ages 5 and 9, who rode their horses all over the country alone, thousands of miles, starting in 1910.
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| Seriously, don't fall in with the alligators |
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| Also, don't climb in with the elephants, please. |
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| The cute folks in the background taking photos are the parents of this zoo educator who were in town visiting where their daughter worked. |
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