The Last Day of Summer Break!

Today was the last day of summer break, and I wanted to do something special and memorable for the kids.  So, we decided to go to the zoo!

Our local zoo, Miller Park Zoo, is pretty small--easy enough to cover in detail in just a couple/few hours, yet nice, with some very cool animals.

We first saw the wallabies and wallaroos.  The kids were surprised to see them hop!

I don't know if it's new to the zoo or not, but we had never seen the porcupine there.  It was hilarious, stretching itself out to get food!

These beautiful flowers reminded us of some of Gram's flowers, and we thought they were SO beautiful!

We had to do one carousel ride.

As we were exiting the zoo, we saw some beautiful butterflies who were visiting too!  They look just like the ones we saw in Indiana last week.  Yellow tiger swallowtail.

An elderly lady was trying to take a photo of a young girl with her outside the zoo, so I offered to take their photo together.  She volunteered the girl to use my phone to take ours.  We thoroughly enjoyed our time at the zoo together.  The kids repeatedly thanked me with dramatic "This was the best day ever!" statements.

Sylvia wondered aloud if there were any geocaches in the park, and we discovered there were several.  We searched for 5, and found and learned lots of cool things, but only found one of the caches.
This was a 2-part geocache, which we didn't complete (because the 2nd part was over a mile away), but it was amazing to learn a bit about this enormous engine, coal car, and caboose, and whistle from the Chicago & Alton Railroad.

One cache was hidden near a memorial to veterans of the Vietnam and Korean Wars.  A park worker came along on a mower, so we had to stop hunting, but we were touched by the beautiful memorial and how it honored those named there.

This tank and 2 cannons used in WWII are now poignant monuments in the park as well.

After some caching, the kids ran out almost all the rest of their energy on the great playground in the park.

We decided to try to find one more geocache, after having no luck with the 4 we'd searched for.  Caeden got his first find!
This thing is the iron (steel?) dome from the Bloomington courthouse that was destroyed in a 2-city-block fire in 1900.

After all the excitement at the park, we stopped at the store quickly to pick up the last school supply--$20 worth of disinfectant hand/face wipes.  Now we are all tuckered out from this summer, but feeling blessed of all the great times and memories!  Thank you God, for summertime and togetherness!