Wildlife Prairie Park

So, I realize that we have not blogged in quite some time. I feel that I need to provide some sort of explanation. First, the fall semester started for Immanuel and with that we have just had less time to go hiking and biking. Second, it's much colder now and the weekends haven't had nice weather lately. Third, we've had a couple things to blog about, but I am quite stubborn. You see, we were suppose to be taking turns on this blog and the next post would be Immanuel's turn. I have been trying to get him to write the post for weeks with no success. Honestly, I probably would have just written it myself (like I'm doing now) forever ago except that it took me a few days to write the "Moonshine Run" post and during that time Immanuel gave me a REALLY hard time about it. At one point he even said, "Fine. Don't write it. Whatever, why don't we just delete the whole blog then?" He will try to tell you this is not true. Anybody who knows him in real life, however, will believe me.

So, I apologize for the delay in posts. This post is about a trip we took back in September for my birthday. We went to a place called Wildlife Prairie Park in Peoria, IL. As a kid I went here with my family and have good memories of the place mostly because it was one of the very few family vacations that I can recall taking where we did not all argue the entire time. I do have one unhappy memory, however, and that is of not being able to go down the gigantic slide because it was raining. Immanuel joked that he would let me go down the slide if I wanted to.

The park consists of trails with animal exhibits spread throughout. The animals are native to Illinois (wolves, black bears, foxes, badgers, etc) and the exhibits are large and very natural. We were glad to have a zoom lens on our camera as this was the only way we were able to see the gray wolves. They were hiding at the very back of the exhibit and even with our high powered zoom lens we were only able to make out wolf like shapes.



There was a petting zoo with goats, horses, and sheep. The sheep was ridiculously soft, way softer than I ever expected. I guess I had never touched a sheep before. The horse was being stubborn and wouldn't come close enough to let me pet him. There was a miniature horse, however, that saw my hand reaching out and decided to walk just close enough and fast enough by me that my fingers were able to barely touch his hair. Stubborn horses.

Here's my friend, the sheep:

This is me, wondering why the horses don't love me.

Something was funny, apparently.

They are very determined to get some leaves.



There was a really nifty looking owl that I spent a lot of time trying to get a good picture of, mostly for my sister-in-law, Aimee, who loves owls.




I really enjoyed the badgers. One of them spent most of the time digging and the other kept pacing back and forth looking for a way out, I assume. Sometimes they would switch duties. There was always at least one pacing, looking along the fence, just in case, by some miracle a hole appeared where one hadn't been for ten years (or however long that exhibit has been there).

At the cougar exhibit we had to endure several minutes of very noisy "meowing". We could have easily tolerated this had it been from the cougar because that would have been somewhat amusing. We could have even tolerated it from a child as that would be kind of cute... maybe. However, the meowing came from a grown man, he must have been at least in his 40s and it was very loud and very obnoxious.

We saw these really neat birds called Sandhill Cranes. The information plate said that they were called "preacher birds" by early settlers because they would tilt their heads up and scream while dancing like a preacher in front of his congregation. These birds also mate for life.

Once we were done seeing all the exhibits I remember thinking, "Man this was much bigger when I was a kid!" All in all though the place was great and we really enjoyed ourselves.

Before we headed to the car I said I wanted to check out the big slide, just to see if it was really as big as I remember, and wouldn't you know it? On the way to the car... it started to rain.