Zoo Thousand Eleven

This past weekend, Cy took Friday off and we headed up to Columbia to spend a few hours at Riverbanks Zoo.  We had scored some discounted zoo tickets via Groupon a few weeks earlier.  It ended up being a really great day for the zoo.  We arrived just after lunchtime and all the school crowds were leaving, so it wasn't very crowded.  The weather was nice too - right around 70 degrees.  Gemma seemed a bit disinterested at first, until we saw some monkeys swinging around and yelling loudly.  Gemma enjoyed watching them swing and started yelling right back at them as loudly as she could.  She seemed to like the penguins a lot too.

I enjoyed the chance to exercise my newly learned photography skills and use some of my new photography equipment to shoot some great pictures:

After we finished at the zoo, we headed to the lake house for the rest of the weekend.  It ended up storming and pouring rain most of the time but we enjoyed just having some time off to relax.  Before the storms hit, we managed to squeeze in a quick boat trip.  It was my first time on a boat since the ill-fated cruise (and probably my last time - I didn't do so well) and Gemma's first time (she did much better than I did).