The giraffe didn't lick us!

When I last posted here, I was in DC, about to head out for a day of who knows what. Well, here's what's what :-)

We head first to the National Air & Space Museum, where, despite the fact that we'd just been there last October, we still had a great time looking at all the exhibits, seeing a show at the Einstein Planetarium, and generally letting Mitch be the fabulously geeky tour guide to All Things Space that he is (but in a good way!) We saw Infinity Express" at the planetarium, which was a nice, classical planetarium show, better suited for kids than the one currently running at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. It was a bit too loud and "showy" for Ethan, whereas the one in DC was just right. Sure, he still sat there with his hands over his eyes and ears, but he made certain to keep his fingers spread far enough apart that he wasn't missing anything happening on the screen!

After a few hours there, we wandered around the Mall, looking at the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival. We happened to be there the weekend Alberta, Canada and Chicago's Latino community were featured. An odd combination, that. Needless to say, we didn't' spend much time there, but it was a great day to just be outside enjoying the sunshine.

After that, we headed back up to NJ.

Sunday came and we decided to take Ethan to the Wild Safari at Six Flags. It was incredible! They have all kinds of animals there: elephants, giraffes, zebras, peacocks, bears, lions, tigers, oryxes, wildebeests, camels, bison, ostriches, emus, rhinos, you name it. What makes this place different from zoos, however, is that you drive in your own car through the habitats. The truly dangerous animals (elephants, lions, tigers) are all in fenced areas so as not to charge the cars, but the rest are allowed to roam free within their given areas. This, of course, means they are free to wander right up to your car, look in the windows, etc. If a group gives you trouble, you're to honk your horn and wait for help. We only came close to doing this once :-)

The giraffes are a curious lot. They pretty much surrounded a car in front of us and then proceeded to lick the car's windows. Ethan was devastated that they only sniffed at ours. When we got to the oryx area, though, we were the ones surrounded. They are some large animals! I've posted a picture at the top of this posting. I thought these were oryx, but now, I'm not so sure. If anyone out there can ID this animal, please let me know!

I am sad to say I went off without my camera this weekend, so I only have pics from my camera phone, which I've not yet had a peek at. I'll look at them this evening and post anything of value later.

I've got some editing I need to take care of now, and Blogger tells me there's a planned outage coming up soon, so I'll be back with more this evening, after Big Brother and the Project Runway casting show.