Wondering why we went to Memphis to go to a zoo instead of to St. Louis? Much as we love the St. Louis zoo, they don’t have pandas. And the girls wanted to see pandas. When we looked up the nearest panda place, it turned out to be Memphis. Four hours away isn’t too bad. So we decided to go. Of course, with twins in tow, it was more like five hours, but still doable.
Tuesday afternoon, we visited the Children’s Museum of Memphis.
Snow White piloted a plane…
…and drove a fire truck…
Rose Red thought the motorcycle was pretty great.
And flying a model plane in the wind tunnel was fun, too.
An entire village with shops? FUN!
Fishing with Aunty was good, too.
For supper we tried A&R BBQ. I should have taken pictures of the ribs…DEE-licious!
Then it was off to the pool for the girls.
The next morning, we hit the Memphis Zoo about 9:00 a.m. It was a pretty day, not too hot, and the zoo was very quiet. Not a lot of people there. Nice! The zoo has a lot of shade, too, so it was very enjoyable walking from exhibit to exhibit.
The stray ducks and the chipmunks were as fascinating to the twins as the gorillas, lizards, and pandas were.
I was surprised that the pandas were much smaller than I expected. One was busy eating. We couldn’t talk Snow White into “petting” the panda through the glass. …I’m coming no closer, thank you, very much…
The other was busy sleeping.
The exhibit is very pretty. Inside a Chinese style building, with the exhibit behind glass so you can get right up to the pandas. But as much as we enjoyed seeing pandas, the girls seemed to enjoy the feed-the-birds exhibit most of all.
It was a lot of fun to take a family trip like that, even if it was a short two day one. And it’s always fun to see things through the eyes of a four year old. Even more so when there are two of them. 🙂
~~Rhonda
