Well we were all set to venture to Asheville and had booked a stay on Hilton points in a suite-style hotel with an indoor pool in so the twins can have their own room and they can get back to swimming (or around water really) for the first time in 4-5 months. However other than that, we really had no clue what else we were going to do there, just knew it was time to get away and destroy a place that wasn't our own. But as has been our luck and pattern recently, the twins both got sick and the whole trip went down the drain. Although, at one point we were still tempted to leave anyway - the thinking being that things would be rough regardless of where we were, so we might as well be elsewhere...but we thought better of subjecting our hotel neighbors to 3 AM crying fits and coughing attacks.
Anyway, despite being tied to Charlotte now, we decided it didn't have to mean we were still homebound hermits, we still had to make something out of the weekend and find an excursion to get out of our germ infested house for a while. So we decided to check out this safari of exotic, or let's call them random, out of place animals we had heard so much about called the Lazy 5 Ranch on the outskirts of Mooresville. All we really knew from local hearsay going into it (and from there website) is that you show up, pay a fee at the gate and the drive your car around their property looking at mostly llamas, ostriches, and various derivatives of the bovine, deer, and goat families with the highlight being the separately fenced in area of giraffes and a then one lone rhino. But what I totally did not realize, until arriving at the gate and being up-sold on a $3 bucket of pellets, was that you could actually feed the animals. So after paying our $17 entry fee (good pricing strategy for the $3 up-sell right?) we basically were like, "Sure, keep the twenty, we'll take some, might be fun to feed a few."
What famous last words...As we came to find out, and as you'll hear all about in elaborate detail, they have a much larger and wider population of animals than expected, all of which are now trained to come up to your car in search of free food...which, theoretically, would play right into part of our thinking in going there now that the twins were facing forward in their car seats....so we figured they should be able to see out enough to spot a few animals and get something out of it. Plus, we were also curious to see if the twins connected the animals they saw on Baby DVD's to the animals they would now see before them. Well, little did we know, "before them" literally meant "right before them", like 4-5 inches right in front of their face, sometimes with their heads inside the car windows.
From the get-go we quickly realized this wasn't just a drive, look, and point type of experience, it was a much more, let's say "interactive encounter" with the animals, as evidenced by the picture below taken of the car in front of us just as we entered the gate. Immediately after, we were spotted by these and other animals and we were right in the thick of it, marked by the herd as the next easy target. With me driving and Catherine in the middle of the backseat between the twins, we got quite the proverbial "more than we bargained for" experience that thankfully didn't scar the kids, Catherine, or our car for life...and one that we can now look back on and laugh, hard. So here is how our three mile trek around the ranch unfolded....
Like I said, as soon as we were spotted pulling in, the animals started coming right up to the car. We already had all the windows down so everybody could see better, but when the first animal, something in the elk/caribou family, promptly stuck his head right into Cate's window it kind of freaked us all out. At first, when Logan saw it coming, he called out and pointed in excitement, but then when the thing poked its head into the window to the point it was close enough to lick his face (see pic), he started to call out in fear and panic. Catherine quickly barked at me to roll the window or pull forward, but I didn't want to either freak this thing out by cranking the window up on him or piss him off by pulling off before he got what he wanted. So I told Catherine to give it a handful of the feed...Reluctant at first, but realizing it might truly be the only way to get his big head out of our car, the next thing I know Catherine has her arm out the window and the big beast is now eating out of her hand!
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| This is some sort of Caribou type thing, rather tall, and rather long in the face, obviously... |
After that first scare (and driving with the windows up for a bit), the excitement returned and we were able to lower the windows back down for the most part - except for when the ostriches came around, they still freaked us all out...it just felt like at any moment they could whip long their neck into the car and start poking away at us. So as we winded our way through the ranch, Catherine played the role of scout on the lookout for (and getting an early read on) any advancing creatures, at which point she would then call out orders for raising or lowering windows to me in the driver's seat with my hand at the controls. All the while, I'm also trying to navigate our way through and around a random collection of llamas, wildebeests, zebras, pigs, ostriches, and other various derivatives of the deer family.
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| Would you want to roll down your window for this? Especially one right in front of your child's face...I think not! |
Never did I think I would one day have something like the following conversation with my wife - especially taking place from some psychedelic safari ranch in Mooresville, NC while she was seated in the backseat between our twins - but I can't tell you how cool it is that I now have.
Catherine: "Hold on, slow down...let's wait and see how the zebra responds to the car in front of us, then decide what to do...but put the windows up for now."
Me: "Right, will do, but let me know if that aggressive emu comes back this way, I think he may have scratched the car."
Catherine: "Quick, take the path to the left before those ostriches see us, there's a pack of deer and antelopes over there that look friendly."
Me: "Ok, well hold on, I now got to wait on a few pigs and miniature goat looking things to get out of the way."
Catherine: "All right, coast clear on the right, you can roll Logan's down, that elk there looks rather tame...but keep Cate's up, those ostriches are still over there and have now been joined by a gnarly looking llama."
And so it went, over and over throughout our trek through the ranch....But what ended up happening over and over though is we'd be feeding and focusing on one side of the car and forget all about the other side (and by "forget" I mean forget the window's down). Until…we would then start to hear the tone of one kid's exertions go from one of amazement to one of fear and panic and we'd turn and look and then, WHOA!, some creature has got almost his entire head inside the car and is now like the two inches from Cate or Logan’s face. If you can recall the movie Jurassic Park, it reminded me of that one scene where the little girl is in the backseat of the Jeep Wrangler and next thing you know a Veloci-Raptor has stuck his head in and although she is starting to freak out, all she can manage to do is moan and softly squeal so as not to disturb it too much. If I could have interpreted the yelps our kids would start making when this kept happening I would imagine it would have been something like, " Um, yeah, hey, HELLO!, look here now, we got a developing situation…I got a big-ass, heavy-breathing, actively drooling, hungry looking species invading my comfort zone here in a major way! Quit looking at the animal on that side and let's start focusing on what we're going to do to appease this one or make it go away...!"
So we’d quickly turn our attention to that side, of course all the while forgetting to roll the other window back up…And so the cycle would continue for next 45 minutes or so as we bobbed and weaved our way through the ranch with Catherine and I teaming up pilot-navigator style to provide the best and safest up-close look at the animal kingdom. Although, sometimes our method (when we remembered to keep the windows up) wasn't so popular as both Cate and Logan would call out for their windows to be lowered or protest whenever we would start putting theirs back up.
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Probably more for their protection than ours, but the Giraffes were actually behind a fence...and not coincidentley they were the but tthey were actually the most tame on the ranch. Guess it that supports the notion that animals with access to free food will aggessively take the easy way out...Not something that's exactly something Darwin would sign off on, but we witnessed it first hand. |
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| As caged as they may be, if you have a 3+ year old and a sun roof, you can feed a giraffe! And that's pretty cool no matter where you are! |
All in all, it was quite an adventure - just as we’d hoped it would be and then some! I'd bet good money that we might be returning out there for a birthday party within the next three or four years…which they are all set up to accommodate with a party shelter, playgrounds, smaller-animal petting zoo, and tractor hayride-style rides around the property for large groups.
Not two or three days after this though, Catherine catches some intestinal virus that she then passes to both the kids…which she became convinced that it was the result of some type of ecoli bacteria outbreak from feeding the animals by hand. She continued to think this was the case until this article came out about an outbreak of a stomach virus in town. (Click Here)
So once that myth was debunked, the only real lasting scar from the local safari adventure was the pellets of feed that stayed in our car for weeks after.
And for the record, we still haven’t made it to Asheville yet…not to jinx it, but we are looking good to try again this weekend after going through one of them having crupe and another will a small form of pneumonia in the past couple weeks.
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| After the tour hanging out in the back of the car after we've taken tours changing each of them in there while the other walked around with one of us checking out the birds and goats. And yes, that is a bulk package of the soft Viva paper towels, definitely multi-tasking on a trip to Mooresville and some random CostCo |
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| Not much prettier than a Zebra, and got a lot closer to one than we ever expected... |
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| Yes, multiple times there were multiple heads comig up for food...as with all of it, it was animal interaction overkill |
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