Vacation, Louisville style day 3

Day #3 of Vacation in Louisville started off a little slower than the previous two days.  Steve had classes to attend in the morning, but planned on being finished by around 11:30.  So, we decided to stay at the hotel and take our time getting ready so that he could join in the fun for the day.  Well, the boys decided that getting up before 8am was a wonderful idea...what kind of vacation is this?!   I tried entertaining them in the room, and this is the result...

Please note that we disconnected the phones as soon as we arrived in the room on day #1.  Because I've told you what my boys do with phones.  But there were 2 phones in the room, so the boys were able to "call" each other...

After about an hour, I decided that two boys cooped up in a hotel room was not a good idea. So we decided to take an adventure walk.

Our hotel room was on the 10th floor, but there were 17 floors (really 16, but they skipped numbering the 13th floor).  So, we hopped on the elevator and went up to check out the view from the top floor.  Here's the Louisville skyline as seen from the 17th floor of the Louisville Marriott downtown, facing north towards the Ohio river.

This next photo is pretty cool.  That black spot in the middle is actually a spider on the outside of the window.  I think it was alive...I thought it was cool because it's on the 17th floor and because I saw one on the outside of the Sear's Tower in Chicago when I was little and have always wondered how it got that high up!

So, the other thing that we did was take a walk though the lobby.  We didn't have internet in our room because it would have cost us $13 PER DAY!  But they had free wi-fi on the first and second floors.  So we went to the second floor and I checked my email.  They we used the skywalk to walk over to the convention center.  The boys thought it was really cool, so I made them race back and forth about 5 times.  It was the length of the city block and I thought it might help them to burn some of their energy.  I got a lot of weird looks, but it worked!

Finally Steve was finished and joined us for the afternoon.  We hopped in the car and found a Chick-Fil-A and the boys were ecstatic!  We let them play for a little bit and then they turned in their toy for an ice cream cone...yum!

Our destination for the afternoon was Henry's Ark.  It's an animal rescue and petting zoo.  I had no idea what to expect because they don't have a website, but I found some favorable reviews and thought the boys would enjoy it.  I was right!  It was chilly on Friday, but we bundled up and it was fine thanks to the sun being out!  There was no admission charge to the petting zoo, but donations were accepted in a donation box.

The first animal you see when you walk in is an ostrich!  He (or she) came right over and we were able to pet it.

This goat was wandering around and the boys thought it was so cool.  I had picked up a bag of carrots (10 lbs!) at Kroger right before arriving, so we fed the goat some.

They had a pond for the ducks as well as some other animals.  That goat just kept following us :)

Zebras!?  Yep, we got to pet them and feed them carrots!

I'm pretty sure this is a Yak.  There were signs posted on the fence, but this one was in the barn and didn't have a sign there.  Whatever it was, it was big!

The goats tried to get out and get our carrots.

I think this was a water buffalo?  It was big and wouldn't come eat the carrot, but we tried!

In addition to Water Buffalo, Yaks, goats and ostrich, there were also sheep, ducks, camels, dogs and cats, bison, peacocks and emu!  Definitely the best petting zoo we've ever been to!  I took a video of feeding the Ostrich right before we left the petting zoo.  Please excuse the sound...it was windy that day!

When we got back to the hotel, my husband took the kids swimming in the pool and I hopped on the treadmill for a few minutes to myself!  It was great to get on there and run to relieve some of the stress of being on vacation with 3 little kids!  We got back to the room and the boys enjoyed an extended bath time with their snorkels and goggles :)  Steve had an awards dinner to attend Friday night, so the boys and I did take out from Champion's which was located in the lobby of the hotel.

Day #3 was a success!