Spur of the moment Atlanta Trip: day two

today was my first day off in a long time where i didn't have to go anywhere or do anything. so i didn't even leave the house. at all. i filled all of the boxes we brought home with just books! i was hoping we had enough boxes for all our stuff. apparently not.

tomorrow travis is going to smithville to do some massages, and i am going to stay home and get all the work done that i've been putting off since we've been doing house stuff every time we have a day off. hopefully i won't just procrastinate all day.

here are pictures from our atlanta trip. baby panda!!!

i realized i have been to so many zoos this year. columbus, st. louis, gatlinburg aquarium, memphis, nashville at least 4 times, and now atlanta. that makes nine! i think i'm going to say that i'm tired of the zoo right now. no more. until the new year. haha. but the atlanta zoo was really fun!


thomas left for his training for the day around 8 so we had the whole fancy room to ourselves. we took a shower in the nice marble glass walled shower and i got to watch vh1 (my favorite guilty pleasure) while travis straightened my hair.


walked to the car and finished up those cookies we bought at ikea. we were worried about the car. we parked it in an outside lot because i couldn't bear to pay 20 dollars for parking in a garage. but the car was fine.


so it was very hard to decide between the zoo and the aquarium. i had been twice, pretty recently, and hadn't been to the zoo since 2005. but the aquarium is awesome! but the zoo was much cheaper, especially after the unexpected half off we got with my nashville zoo membership. if i had remembered they had a BABY PANDA it would have been the zoo no contest. because even though i am panda obsessed, i hadn't seen a baby yet.

if you want my expert advice, the best time to go to the zoo is right after they open. i mean it. if you arent going to get there until the afternoon, you might as well not even bother.

first we went into their budgie exhibit. this seems to be a new zoo trend. they just opened one in memphis, but it was closed when we got there. this was was excellent! much more fun than feeding lorikeets. i don't know why, it just was. as you can see, i was thrilled.

that one was one of the babies, born during the summer. the millet sticks they give you seem really small for a dollar. but they take forever to eat. i bet i had birds on me for 20 minutes straight!



then as he finished eating all the seeds, little birdie turned around and pooped on my palm. lovely. hahah. still fun.


the lion was so close to the glass, roaring at us! so awesome! weirdly the same thing happened last time i was there, four years ago. still awesome.



their gorilla exhibit was really big and nice. they had so many babies too! so cute and playful and strangely human.



can you see the baby orangutan? he was so cute. the big female was allegedly using a computer in that tree, and the baby just wouldn't leave her alone. he keep hanging on her arms and tumbling down the hill. he was much more entertaining than the keeper talk. there were a bunch of kids in front of us (i was in a good mood, i kept telling kids to get in front of me so they could see) and they were asking funny questions like "do they all sleep in ONE bed?' and "why is their hair red?". for some reason school groups don't annoy me as much as kids with their parents.


so then we went to the panda house! i was cooing over the mama panda, so cute and fuzzy and close to the glass, when i looked over and saw.....

baby panda!!! i have never seen anything cuter. i was beside myself.

he climbed up to the top of the tree thing! so cute.

this poor lady. her video is going to be a lot of me squeeing and saying "omg travis look!" and my loud shutter clicking. haha. i never even got a great picture. i finally tore myself away when i heard a woman telling the school kids with her to keep moving so other people could see.




i love kangaroos. and i always think its going to be exciting to see them at the zoo. but they are always sleeping and sad looking. look at their weird feet!


cutest pig i have ever seen! i can't remember what they are called, but i think they are from new zealand. and it looked like a pig/border collie! there was a cute brown spotty one too.


for some reason sheep wearing collars are really cute to me. maybe because they wear collars in babe.



i held back in the gift shop and only got a little panda cup, and a magnet with the baby panda on it. i wanted one of those tiny glass animals. the ant eater or the african wild dog.


then i forced travis to drive us 10 miles out of town to go to the dwarf house! the original chickfila! i guess it's just fun because it is like an old diner, and they have more stuff than a regular chickfila. and a big dwarf mural. and you get your chicken sandwich on a plate, not in a bag.



travis claimed he was going to get a "hot brown" which sounds so gross. but decided not too because "i don't know what they mean by cream sauce." hahah, what? you can kind of see the dwarf mural behind travis. the dwarves walked back and fourth.

we went back to the hotel to sit out the rush hour traffic and see thomas again before we left (i can't believe i didn't take even one picture of him). we walked to one of the overpasses near the hotel. there was a project in atlanta to put georgia folk out on overpasses. there was some really cool stuff!

he is so obsessed with beards right now! haha.