Bronx Zoo!

Today I went to the Bronx Zoo! It was very hot, and I didn't get to see everything (holy cow it's much bigger than I thought), but I had a fun time.

I ended up buying a zoo membership - it lets you get into ALL of the NY zoos for free, plus free parking, discounts at their stores, and I can bring a guest at no charge. Since I plan on going to the other zoos while I'm staying here and maybe want to go back to the Bronx, I figured it was worth it. The membership also gives you full park privileges like riding the tram (TOTALLY WORTH IT JUST FOR THAT).

The zoo had this really cool monorail that took you through the Asian animal exhibit. Here are some friendly elephants!

 The architecture of the main zoo was really pretty. This is part of the "central" zoo exhibit - the inside was undergoing renovations, but it was beautiful to walk through anyway.

Those of you that know me personally know that I own a bearded dragon and have a fondness for all things reptilian. This was a very active and friendly chuckwalla.

And this was a very pretty snake, nicknamed the Rhino Viper. She had beautiful eyes and scales

Beautiful and deadly: a very alert rattlesnake.

Another favorite part of the architecture: all of the original "houses" had animal carvings on the outside! The reptile house, pictured below, had crocodiles, snapping turtles, and frogs carved into it, while the old big cat house had lions, leopards, and tigers, etc.

I'm not sure what kind of bird this is, but he is very beautiful!

Some of the bird exhibits were open air - either you walked through them, or they simply had no glass. This guy was maybe 3 feet above me and was very curious about my camera.

Finally, one of my favorite birds simply because of its name: The Tawney Frogmouth!

The Bronx Zoo, like most zoos nowadays, is very big on conservation. The gorilla exhibit was one of the special "extra" exhibits and focused on gorilla and rainforest conservation, and was very well put together.

Like I said, I didn't get to see everything today, and it was VERY hot so a lot of the bigger animals were hard to find, so I might try to go back another day with comfier shoes and a water bottle :)

Overall though, an amazing zoo and I highly recommend it.

Ireland Friday

Busy day today! We started bright and early, waking up at the oh-so-painful 4:30 am. We hopped on our first Irish taxi (interesting note: they’re driven by locals, but you still can’t understand them) and made our way to the bus stop to get on the 6 am bus to Galway.

The next few hours are a blur, as we both sleep quite soundly on the bus. We got to the Galway station about a half hour early, so we hightailed to a cute little cafe for breakfast. After waking up over a pot of tea, we went back over to the station to hop on our tour. For a 10 euro tour, the bus itself was about what we expected (aka, a little scary), but the tour was great. Also, before our tour, we made 20 euro by taking a survey at the visitor’s center. Hooray for money!

We made a huge loop around the Galway bay area, starting in Galway city and ending at the Cliffs of Moher. We traveled through a ton of cute little villages and saw lots of lambs.

Our first actual stop was at a tomb in the Burren. What a landscape! So high up and lots and lots of cool looking rocks. You could see around for miles.

After that, we passed by several ruins and drove through several towns, including Lisdoonvarna, which is home to Europe’s largest singles events, the Matchmaking Festival. Unfortunately, this is in September, so we weren’t able to be matched up with any Irish men. Next time maybe ;)

We stopped for lunch in Doolin. Using our freshly earned 20 euro, we both tried Jameson whiskey…fantastic! We also met Molly, the yellow lab. She was just hanging around outside the pub, so we got to pet her for quite a while. She was such a good doggy!

After lunch, it was off to the cliffs! For those of you that don’t know, both the Princess Bride and Harry Potter & the Half Blood prince were filmed here. They were absolutely gorgeous! We took a ton of photos and got as close to the edge as we dared. We walked along an “illegal” path to get really close to the edge, but since huge groups were doing it as well, we figured it really didn’t matter. No one fell off the cliffs either :D

Once we finished at the cliffs, we drove around to some more towns, stopped at the limestone walks in the Burren along the coast, and took some photos at a castle where they were doing wedding photos. Then it was back to Galway, back to Dublin, and back to our hotel, where we packed and toasted with the meade we bought at the cliffs.

So, we’re heading back tomorrow….but we’re both ready to come back as soon as we can.

In light of this being our last night, we’ll share some wisdom our driver gave to us today.

“In life, you only have two things to worry about: if you’re well, or if you’re sick. If you’re well, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re sick, you only have 2 things to worry about: whether you’re going to get better, or whether you’re going to get worse. If you’re going to get better, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re going to get worse, you have only 2 things to worry about: whether you’re going to live, or whether you’re going to die. If you’re going to live, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re going to die, you have only 2 things to worry about: whether you’re going up, or you’re going down. If you’re going up, you have nothing to worry about.

If you’re going down, you’ll be too busy shaking hands with all your friends to worry about anything.”

Love, Brit and Sadie