Well, we rather outdid ourselves with Butterfly Birthday - with narration, photos, slide show, video, and even links to more information. Wow!

I wanted that posting to stay as the main, front page for a while so all two or three of our occasional readers might see it. But I suppose seven months is quite long enough. Someday I’d like to get caught up with our news. But instead, I’m going to start small - with our recent trip to the Guadalajara Zoo. Besides, everybody likes animal pictures…

The day before Thanksgiving we went to the Guadalajara Zoo (and Safari and Aquarium). It was my idea, and something I’d been wanting to do for quite a while. Our friends Elizabeth and Greg had talked about it too, and luckily, we picked a day when they could come along. The zoo is on the far northern side of Guadalajara and we live to the south, so we basically had to drive into the city and back out a ways. It took a little more than an hour with construction slowing things down.

Here’s a photo at the main entrance. In the distance there’s a pond, fountain, and flock of pink flamingos:

We found the zoo to have a very pleasant feel to it. First of all, there was hardly anyone there. We did later run into a mob or two of school children, but they were fun enough. Mainly, the zoo had a good feel because it was spacious, with plenty of trees, shade, water, well maintained paths, snack bars, restrooms, etc. The animals seemed to have a reasonable amount of space in their “habitats” too, although I really wouldn’t know.

Here are a few of our best photos, in order of our day:

The beautiful white tigers were some of our favorites:

The zoo is on the edge of a canyon. We stopped for lunch with our table overlooking this view:

After lunch, we took the “safari,” a bumpy ride in a large open area:

It was fun. We all got to feed carrots to the giraffes:

We also caught a great view of a rhinoceros:

After the safari, we took the people mover train back to near the main entrance. There we enjoyed watching a mother and baby hippo playing in the water:

We had had a pretty long day, but didn’t want to miss the aquarium. Our favorites were probably the shark tank and these spotted-rays:

We arrived back home after dark. Cobre, our dog, had been alone in the house all day so we were wondering what we might find when we got home - but hooray, everything was fine.

We all agreed it had been a very successful day - and a great change from the day-to-day.