Indianapolis Spring Break, Day 1
We took our Spring Break to Indianapolis this year, and boy was it fun! We decided on Indianapolis by searching for the warmest weather for the week. Haha!! Aside from Florida (obviously!), the warmest place within a day’s drive we could find was Indy!
It ended up being the absolute perfect day for the zoo! The weather was beautiful and even though the breeze was still cool, the sun was warm! Our winter this year has been pretty cold for a long time with only two or three warm days, so being free to take our jackets off for the afternoon was great! The animals were so active as well – such a great day!
First we checked out the aquarium. KC has always liked seeing the large tanks of colorful fish, and RA was pretty interested too! There was a touch pool for sharks! They were little sharks, though, so no worries. KC isn’t quite tall enough to really reach in and feel anything in the touch pools yet, but he sure liked seeing them. There were tanks of jellyfish, coral tanks with different shapes, and of course fish of all different shapes and colors, like the lionfish (those guys are venomous, so watch out!) Philip says you can tell when you’re entering the penguin section, because it always smells like poo. (Sorry, TMI??) Penguins which weren’t swimming tend to stand around a lot – they must have been sleeping.
It’s fun when the animals seem to enjoy saying “Hello” as much as kids do! This Walrus was awesome!!
One really neat area we went to was the underwater dolphin viewing section. It was one of our favorites! You can see the dolphins swimming around above, below and beside you. What was really neat to us, being music nerds, was that the space had a lot of echo to it, and if we find a space with lots of echo, we like to hum “ooh ahh”-type of music that sounds like old Renaissance chanting! Philip would hum a steady drone and I would sing notes above him. It’s sooo much fun – I hope when I’m in Heaven I can make harmonies with myself and make big chords with my voice!
KC decided to add his voice to the mix in shouts and yells. It wasn’t quite as harmonious as what Philip and I were doing, but I really hope someday our whole family can make harmonies like that!
KC’s favorite animal we saw there was the red panda (which isn’t really a panda at all.) It’s more like a cross between a raccoon and a bear. It liked wandering its area and climbing trees. KC said, “I didn’t know there was an animal like that!”
After some lunch at the zoo (really yummy chicken sandwiches!), we went to see more animals. The brown bears were a big hit! They were especially active today! They chased, they wrestled, one swam, and made big splashes, and they attracted a large crowd!
This is as close as I ever want to get to a bear! RA was pretty interested in them. We watched these bears for quite a while during our wait for the next event. The dolphin show was coming up, and that was a fantastic show!
KC was completely absorbed in the show and was all smiles. It kept RA’s attention, too!
There were some video segments on the screen, the trainers talked about how much fun they have working with dolphins, and the dolphins showed their tricks. There was one little girl who got to come to a wading area in the center to get up close and personal to one of them, and she was loving it! The folks who sat in front got splashed more than once, but we sat farther back. The house was packed with people – the show is probably the zoo’s biggest draw, and we can see why!
We had at least a couple hours left before the zoo closed for the day. The zoo was divided into three primary areas: Forest, Plains, and Desert. We had spent most of the time in the Forest section, but we did a quick walk-thru of the other sections. By this time, we had shed our jackets and were really enjoying the warmth! The animals were too, by the looks of it!
“Who you looking at?”
KC had seen that there was a playground area in the center of the zoo by the café we had lunch at and was extremely eager to go over there and play. It was a great way to finish the zoo! KC played and RA snacked on our supply of finger foods, mainly yogurt bites.
Just look at that sun-kissed smile!
The last area we checked on our way out was the butterfly garden. It was very pretty, complete with a butterfly incubator. We stopped by at just the right time, too, because a couple of them were just breaking out of their cocoons! How neat to see God’s nature in action! The boys were pretty tired by then and we were ready to head to our hotel to rest for a while before supper.
Our hotel, Candlewood Suites, was not far from the zoo. The rooms are all suites, so they are nice and big! We had a bedroom, private bath, plus a nice living room with a lot of floor space, a little small room with an ironing board, a kitchenette, and even a nice long table top to hold things! The couch folded out for KC and RA slept in his Pack-N-Play in our room. It was so nice to have a big space for the boys to wander and play during our stay.
Oh, for those of you wondering about the Halloween bucket – it’s where KC keeps his matchbox cars. Hehe!
We love finding unique places to eat during our travels. Any kind of food that is different than our usual local standards is always a top destination for food when we travel! Our supper the first night in Indy was Mexican! I’m so glad someone invented TripAdvisor. What would we do without the helpful guides, maps & customer reviews to help us maximize our vacation?
Happy bellies, but feeling tired, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for day 2.
We went to The Tamale Place! This place was different. They figured we were newbies, so they gave us the rundown of the menu. It was yummy and filling! Chips & salsa, rice & beans, tamales (one of them was a pumkin tamale!) and Philip got something called a torta which was only the half-order, but was still big!
It was a great first day of vacation! Perfect weather during the day, though it did cloud over and get breezy and cold in the evening. Amazing that we had only decided just the night before we left that we were going here!
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