Trip with the cousins - New Orleans

We spent the last week on a vacation with S#2 and family.  We took a week long cruise out of New Orleans.  It was a nice vacation and fun was had by all.

The cruise left on Sunday but we drove in on Friday so we could enjoy a few days in New Orleans. Saturday S#2 & the kids and I met up with friends from Kazakhstan at the New Orleans Zoo. DH and I have been to New Orleans several times but this was my first chance to go to the zoo.



Crazy B!


S#2 thought this was funny so I took a picture. One monkey is eating bugs from the other monkey's armpit. I told her I would blog it and I don't think she believed me.






Kids in a tree


Kids in a net


Enjoying the "Cool Zoo"

After the zoo, we went to the one spot I really wanted to hit while in town, Frankie & Johnny's.  I told S#2 about it and she said her friend had already mentioned it for lunch. I got a shrimp po-boy and shared fried pepper rings with DH.


The food was as good as I remembered. After lunch we had another N.O. tradition that I had never experienece before, snoballs. The line to get one was a testament to how popular the place is.






After my big lunch, I decided to skip the snoballs. S#2 got a limeade and made me regret my decision. Too bad, but I wasn't going to wait in line for another 30 minutes for one of my own. If we ever make it back, I know exactly what I'll order.

At the end of the day we headed out to a Zephyrs game.  We were suppose to go on Friday night but there was a horrendous rainstorm and it was cancelled.  We were treated to a double header instead.


The ballpark was nice and small.  It was bobblehead night.  The bobblehead was the coach of the LSU baseball team and I had no clue who he was, but he used to coach at ND, so we'll keep it. The baseball bingo was fun to play, almost as fun as scoring a game. One of the kids got a baseball tossed to them.  None of the other kids pouted over not getting a ball.  It was a very nice end of a very nice day.

an afternoon

Yesterday I preparing to make a quesadilla from stale tortillas and leftover cheese.  DH walked in and suggested something else.












We picked up some burgers and went to the zoo. Our membership expires tomorrow so we needed to renew. We walked through Zoo North to burn off some of those hamburger calories. We checked out the new koalas.  On our way home, we decided to drive over the new Margaret Hunt Hill bridge that opened for traffic only hours before.  It was a nice afternoon date.

A day at the zoo

Our first real day of summer vacation, a trip to the zoo

















I love our zoo membership. We headed down early, visited the nature center to trade, ate a picnic lunch in the shade and fed the giraffes. A couple of hours and we were out of there.

zoo

We had a record high of 85 yesterday. We took advantage of the afternoon and went to the Dallas Zoo to finally see the new Savanna exhibit. The new section of the zoo was very nice, so much better than the old cement cells the animals used to be housed in.









My favorite part of the zoo is still the Nature Exchange. The kids all brought in their bags of collected stuff. It was a great visit. We stumped the guys with a green metamorphic rock that they cracked open with a hammer to get a better look at what it was made of. We surprised them with a strange mushroom that they had never seen before. J brought in a jacaranda seed pod that was in "great condition" and got one of the guys all excited. A brought in the leftover bee honeycomb and chrysalis from the swallowtail that we had this summer.

Someday I want to work at the Nature Exchange and look at interesting things all day long.