My favorite photo from today- What a beauty she is!
Yesterday was my/our (very anticipated) road trip to Indiana to visit Wildlife In Need, Inc. I had found this place online earlier this year and last week I decided that it was time for us to go. Who wouldn't want to play with baby tigers?! I bought myself and Micah each a ticket ($35 a person) and talked Kourtney and Noah into accompanying us. Wildlife In Need is located in Charlestown, Indiana, which is about a 3 hour drive from Mt. Vernon.
I will say though, for my Illinois/Missouri friends- if you are looking at going: Charlestown is on EASTERN time. So keep that in mind, the time is an hour ahead of ours! I'm glad that Kourtney pointed that out yesterday, because I might not have thought about that, and we would have showed up an hour late and missed our session time. Also, their website says not to trust your GPS once you get into Charlestown, Indiana because of the gravel roads not being registered...but we had no problems with ours. My phone GPS took us right there, but I had the directions from the website ready just in case.
We started our road trip off well, but some of us have the bladder capacity of a toddler, so we had to find a rest stop just over the Indiana state border. Naturally, any time we stop, we have to Pokemon Go! (Stop 1)
Anyways, WIN (Wildlife in Need) has many exotic animals, not just Tigers. In our hour and a half session, we got to see foxes, wolves, monkeys, an African hog, and a jackal. On our way into the session, we walked past birds, lemurs, and two turtles.
Here is a photo of one of them yawning :)
The first part of the session, you get introduced to the different animals and get to learn a little bit about them. We have a ton of pictures to go through. It was hard because these animals literally run around the room and you have to be quick on the draw, or else they are gone. Especially with the monkeys and the foxes. Micah was quick enough to snap a picture of the monkey sitting on my head.
And also with the silver fox getting ready to crawl in my lap..he was so soft and I think he even purred a little bit..that or he was hissing at me, I couldn't tell.
When they finally brought out the tigers (there were 5 cubs), everyone was so excited. The cubs all stayed in the front of the room, as if waiting for something. As if on cue, here came one of the staff members with 5 bottles. The cubs were all eyes on those bottles, and Micah was lucky enough to be handed one! He had two cubs fighting on him over who got the bottle, and unfortunately I couldn't get any good pictures because the handler was between me and Micah, and we weren't allowed to stand up and walk around while the animals were running free. So, the photo below is the only one I got of Micah feeding the cub. You can't see his face, but I enjoy the reaction on the man sitting next to him :) :)
As I mentioned, we have a ton of pictures, so I am going to just let them do the talking.
The pictures don't quite do it justice, and many of ours are blurry because the animals don't sit still very long. I think our session would have been more enjoyable if the children near us would have behaved a little bit better (This is why they asked that you NOT bring any children under the age of 5!) , and you can see in several of the photos just how crowded the small room was.. I guess summer is a pretty busy time for them. (And we chose a Saturday instead of a day during the week..)
As I mentioned we had 5 rambunctious cubs in our session, Micah managed to get a picture of 4 of the 5: 3 of the 4 of the orange tigers and the white one. He also got a great picture of the wolf cub!
Even after visiting, I still don't know a whole lot about Wildlife in Need, Inc. We learned that they are a non-profit organization, and at least part of their mission is to rescue and rehabilitate animals in need. For instance, we were told during our session that they currently have a barn owl that fell out of the nest too early and couldn't get back up. So when it was found, it was dehydrated and malnourished, so the founder/owner, who is a master falconer, is working on getting him nursed back to health. So part of the animals on the property are going to be released back into the wild, but we get the impression that the other part of the animals are just pets. They made mention that they have a 19 year old tiger, who the owner has had since he (the tiger) was only 4 weeks old.
Here is a photo of the owner, getting some love from one of "his" cubs.
I will say, the animals all knew him. He popped his head up for a few minutes during the presentation and the monkey tried to jump to him. And when he came into the baby tiger playtime, the two cubs that were closest and saw him, both ran to him and jumped on him. One of them (playfully) bit him too :) He smacked her and told her that she knew better. It was neat to see him interact with the animals. but he didn't try to take away from the time we got to spend.
On our way back, we had to stop at the rest stop (Stop 2) for Pokemon...
Then we stopped in Poseyville, IN and ate at the Red Wagon.
My Catfish Po'Boy was delicious. The fish was fried lightly and the batter was crunchy but not greasy from being fried. Micah had a burger that he said was also excellent. I would eat there again!
We got about 20 miles down the road and saw another sign for a rest stop and at this point, I didn't fight it and just played Pokemon too.
All in all, a pretty fun way to spend our Saturday. And we got our state picture for Indiana to put on our map!
**Shout out to Micah for driving us the entire time and making a 6 hour round-trip drive. You rock! Thanks for going along with my crazy antics :) Love you!** --Since he reads my blog to see what I say about him, I thought I'd make this one good
