Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Buffalo spit, attack ostriches and sunsets

The last few days of leave have been great. My smallpox blister is coming along now - about the size of a quarter and starting to get a little tender, but it shouldn't last more than two or three more weeks.

The last day of camping I took the family to a nearby safari park. I'm not much of one to plug advertising for places, but this place is first rate. I recommend this to anyone with kids or anyone who just plain likes critters. It is located near Natural Bridge. (Their Website) The animals run free here and come right up to the car and sometimes parts of them are "in the car"! It was great fun, especially watching my family trying to feed the buffalo which we found liked to slobber all over the car. My three year old especially liked feeding the giraffe. I found myself on the recieving end of an ostrich who when I ran out of food decided to try to taste various parts of the car. He quickly found out it was a drive through restaurant.

So it was great -- we went from the altitude of the Skyline Drive across the mountains into the depths of the earth in local caverns. We sampled local cruisine and cooked some of our own over roaring fires. We fed the animals and we even watched a beautiful sunset. We visited the creation drama at the Natural Bridge, where God provided His own exclamation point in sending a huge meteor from the Perseid Meteor Shower streaking by visible through the opening under the bridge.

Tomorrow back to work -- already have lots of my calendar booked up, including a three day evolution off site testing a new computer system we may be using soon. And of course the number one priority now is to get ready for my upcoming deployment.