trip to texas picturepalooza! (part 7)

"why hello there, birthday girl..."

in this episode: we pick up gus from camp longhorn, celebrate my birthday in glen rose at the most beloved fossil rim (twice), then hit the road for arkansas. enjoy!

happy camper gus!

sophie absolutely velcroed herself to gus as soon as she saw him--she missed him so much

umm, my camp didn't look like this...rich and i are ready to try and go there ourselves after seeing it

gus and his horse, paco (yes, that really is his name)

gus swimming with the camp dog in the lagoon--where was my lagoon, damnit? we had the north fork of the guadalupe river, snake infested as it is...

...and i'm pretty sure after seeing all this camp loveliness sophie'll be there, too (in a few years)

so. long. horn. (love the puns around camp)

from camp longhorn to dinosaur valley state park in glen rose--this is possibly the greatest government building in a 100 mile radius (it's the ranger station at the entrance)

dinosaurs! these are old sinclair oil dinosaurs from the 1964 world's fair in new york

and of course rich had to feign feeding sophie to the t-rex

gus 'n me with sophie examining the scary 70 foot apatosaurus behind us...

...and once we returned to the hotel sophie decided that she, too, could be just as scary.

gus attempting the human habitrail at the glen rose dairy queen (sophie's not one to tarry)

fossil rim! first off: an ostritch confronting a sophie

gorgeous fallow deer--they are thriving and reproducing like crazy at fossil rim

fallow deer in several flavors

herd o' sables plus one loner

aoudads--these guys have freaky sideways pupils, like goats

white rhinoceros. surprisingly gentle animal.

emu--this guy absolutely scared the holy hell out of rich, so much so that he threw almost an entire bag of animal food at him (which pissed me off greatly, as we had just gotten there)...apparently he didn't realize his window had an "up" function

rich eyed all animals with great suspicion after the emu incident

beautiful, graceful, reticulated giraffe

don't you just want to scratch under that chin? (i'm pretty sure you get kicked out of the park if you do. yikes--now i'm making a stripper/giraffe comparison in my brain, as they're both protected under the look-but-don't-touch rule. that is just wrong on so many levels. damn that gutter...)

me feeding my new best friend

i am just so in love with these animals--i just about fainted when this guy chose to hang out at our car, with several of his friends, for a good 20+ minutes

rich was basically okay with the giraffe

actually, he was probably more than okay with them

this guy, however, reignited his specist bias against animals

and, of course, rich got all the animals on his side of the car, damnit

stripy zebras

stripy, stripy zebras

stripy, stripy, stripy zebras

happy kiddos, fossil rimmed/glen rosed out, on their way to arkansas. and yes i shot this while the car was moving.