Yep, I was also at the wild animal park with a couple of other bloggers on Tangent’s. Check out their stories here and here.

I had a lot of fun on my latest trip to the African Safari Park in Port Clinton. This year was a slightly different experience for me. Number 1 it was the first time I ever took my own vehicle into the park. Number 2 was that this year I had back window that could open all the way. My very first experience with this park was back in the 1970’s. They still had lions in an area you could drive through. Having lions right outside your vehicle is something else. I’m sure the insurance cost and the safety of the animals brought this practice to an end. As much as I like the big cats, I think this is a better park for not having them there.

Now on to what they did have. Lots of Elk. To have one of these large members of the deer family stick their head in your vehicle is really something. To have 4 of them at once, that is beyond belief. Of course they do want to be fed, and are looking, and smelling for handouts. One even took a whole bag of carrots, but we got them back, I don’t think she liked the bag.

Then there were some smaller deer and antelope roaming the area. They were a well behaved when compared to their larger brethren. They seemed a little bit shy this year, compared to last year’s visit. Maybe they were just well fed and had no need to come up to the cars and trucks.

On to the American Bison, and very large cattle. I had the “pleasure” of going face to face with an American Bison on the ride through the park. This does tend to make me a bit leery, since I know someone who has a bison ranch, and I’ve seen first hand what one of those animals can do to a truck when they want to. These bison seem very friendly, but they do have terrible breath. They really seemed to like walking with the vehicles as they drive through. We had one that was only interested in the carrots, and would not take the other dried pellets the park sells. The cattle were something else. I saw two types, both had very large horns, but one had very long hair. My youngest called him Ludo last year, because he reminded her of the Large creature from the movie Labyrinth. We did manage to save a carrot for him. The other two long horned cattle had horns about 4 to 5 feet long each and the base was at least 12 in circumference. Big horns. That did stop these fellows from sticking their head too far into the truck, but they had very long tongues to make up for that.

Then on the the area where the other animals were enclosed away from the vehicles. Among these were Giraffes, Zebras and a Giant Eland. Even they got close to the fences looking for handouts.

Everything about the early part of the day was great fun. Everybody got to get as much of the animal experience as they wanted, and I think we went away happy. A little damp, from drool, but happy.

And I got a photo of me with a rather large snake. Not that I really think these would make a good pet for me, but I am strangely drawn to these fascinating creatures.

I’m trying to find out the names of the large cattle, hopefully they are on the brochure. They don’t appear to be on the website

Of all the places to find fun, who would have thought that middle of nowhere, IN would be such a sight?  Every summer, we meet my mom there about 4 times to swap the kids.  She’ll take them for a week, twice a summer, so because South Bend just happens to be about as close to halfway for each of us to drive, that is where we meet.  We used to meet at a Wendy’s just off the expressway, but our horizons have broadened, and my husband and I have been venturing off the beaten path to discover new things to see and do in the area.  We found a good restaurant called Eleni’s with amazing gyros and saganaki, two of our favorite dishes.  We also found an authentic Greek restaurant called Elia’s right down the street, but oddly enough, they are almost never open.  They have more exotic Greek food like stuffed grape leaves, moussaka, and baklava, YUM!  Their food is excellent, though we’ve only been able to eat there once because of their strange hours and seemingly constant family vacations.  After eating and getting the kids back from my mom, we headed to the Potawatomi Zoo.  The zoo is a really cool size, perfect for our family of 3 small children and a now VERY pregnant woman.  Not much walking to do at all, yet it has a good amount of animals, native and exotic, all types and sizes from lions, tigers, and bears, to monkeys, bison, alligators, parrots, and red pandas.  I wil have to mention that the Potawatomi Zoo did not seem very well-kept.  A gardener in that place could have done wonders as there were many overgrown weeds, trees, and shrubbery, some even blocking what could have been better views of the animals!  One tree was so untrimmed it was blocking a drinking fountain!  But as I said, it’s a very cute little zoo, and they reciprocate with our home zoo, the Toledo Zoo, so our admission price was free and they don’t charge for parking.  I was surprised to see that the zoo wasn’t very crowded seeing as how it was a Saturday in June under 90°…  That zoo could really use a Jack Hanna to fix it up and get the publicity rolling – I see a lot of potential for it, but it does need some work.

After the zoo, we had kids begging for ‘one more fun thing’ (remember, they had been used to the fun of Grandma’s for just short of a week!), my husband whips out Mr. GPS, and apparently he has a phone book feature on him, so from your car, you can find gas stations, restaurants, and most importantly, fun places and attractions to visit!

So KUDOS belong to Mr. GPS this time!  Instead of getting us lost and chuckling at us electronically, he led us right to this strip mall that was like a step back in time, it was really strange.  It looked like it was right out of 1983.  I don’t know how to explain it – we should have taken pictures.  It would have been a great place to film a movie set in the early ’80’s, took me right back to my childhood.  Anyway, in this strip mall was a place called Mega Play.  From the outside, it looked closed down – they really need to get themselves a big bright ‘open’ sign.  But once inside, it was a huge space where they had tons of video games, pinball machines, indoor minigolf, bouncy castles and tunnels for the kids, lots of ride-ons for toddlers, and right out of 1983 – a ball pit!  The ball pit had a pyramid in the middle of it that the kids climb up with ropes and once they got the hang of it, they had a ball – cheesy pun intended.  That pyramid gave me a flashback of playing on the same thing when I was little.  I think they used to have them in KMarts, and my husband agreed.  It was neat to see vintage video games and pinball machines also.  The arcade ATARI games they had in one bouncy castle area were free to play – they had Kangaroo, Pole Position, Asteroids, and some shooting game I hadn’t heard of.  I walked over to the pinball machine area because days earlier, we visited this cool pinball shop in a suburb of Toledo.  The guy started it as a hobby, but it grew into a store, and he had all kinds of pinball machines, new and mostly vintage.  He had titles on display like Demolition Man, Star Wars, The Shadow, and Hercules (an older game – it was HUGE!).  He even had this Looney Tunes racing game (not pinball) that was really vintage and one-of-a-kind…  it was cool to see.  I wonder if the pinball guy outside of Toledo is familiar with Mega Play?  But anyway, back to Mega Play…  it was a huge, wide-open strip mall space that had tons of games, ride-ons, and bouncy castles packed into it – lots of fun there, but still spacey so you didn’t feel closed it.  It was the exact concept my husband and I had in mind for our own business of the same type we started a few years ago.  We ended up having to sell the business because it was too labor intensive for the time and staff we had however.  Too bad Mega Play is all the way in South Bend, or we could challenge our putt-putt-ing friends to the mini-golf course 🙂

After Mega Play, it was time to find something to eat, and before we knew it, we were out of South Bend and into the country.  The kids started getting crazier and crazier, and we vowed to stop at the very next restaurant we found before someone passed out or went insane – and some of us were close to either condition!  So, we stopped at a restaurant called Dakota’s in Elkhart IN, and I highly recommend it if you’re ever out that way.  They had the best cornbread, and their steak and cheese sandwich was simply AWESOME!  They also have barbecue items, and they happened to have karaoke the night we went…  it wasn’t too intrusive though.  They were in another room and we didn’t even know it was karaoke at first until the audience began applauding.  The DJ hosting the karaoke was singing a few songs also, and he was pretty good, so he actually sounded like a recording with a live quality.  I don’t how often they have karaoke there, but their food is great, prices reasonable, nice atmosphere, and the staff is amazingly friendly.  Keep in mind I say this coming from a super-friendly town myself, so we’re used to the usual chit-chat when we go out to eat –  but people in Elkhart were exceptionally friendly.

Overall, not a bad place to spend a day – fun and very inexpensive to boot.  Too bad with gas prices the way they are we can’t consider South Bend for a normal day trip for our family – there is plenty to do!  Maybe we’ll wander around some more the next time we meet Grandma there in July…