GOATS ON A DURANGO! (and other animal/vehicular terror)

This weekend we took Mer's sister Martha, her husband Edward, and our niece Madison to the Lazy Five Ranch in Mooresville, NC. The Lazy 5 has, according to their brochure, over 700 animals from around the world, including goats, deer, zebras, giraffes, emus, ostriches, and other woodland/grassland/etc. creatures. The interesting thing is that you can drive your own vehicle around the ranch on a 3.5 mile trail to observe the animals in their habitat. Also, it should be noted that upon entry, you can buy food to give to the animals from the car, which they are apparently quite fond of.

So fond, in fact, that one of the beasts, namely one like the fellow here:

decided to try to climb up the side of the car and thus produced the following scratches on the automobile. Meredith is not pleased. My pal Turtle Wax and I are going to try to fix it. We'll see how that goes.


Also, there are certain animals that you are advised not to feed, one of those being the zebra. Unfortunately, Meredith found the zebra just too cute, and decided to feed him anyway. The zebra, seeing this forbidden gesture as a great opportunity, decided to stick his head into the vehicle and try to take the feed bucket away from its current owner. Meredith would have none of this though, and fought to retain ownership of her feed bucket and force the zebra's head out of the window. Unfortunately, I was unable to think quickly and capture this moment on camera, but thanks to Photoshop and our good friends at Google Image Search, I've been able to construct a fairly accurate recreation of the events as shown here:


Despite these slight confrontations, a good time was had by all and we look forward to another trip when Madison is a little older and not so afraid of the larger animals (she was kind enough to donate one of her pacifiers to the animals though!) Bring your own graham crackers!