West Michigan Stay-Cation ’11 – The Museum, Zoo and more!

Well, the summer is over. David went back to school three days ago.

Sigh. I miss summer already.

Dave finally got some time off too, so we spent the two weeks before school started wrapping up our stay-cation. We crammed quite a few things into those two weeks.

John Ball Zoo

We have two great zoos in our area. Binder Park Zoo, which we visited earlier in the summer, and John Ball Park Zoo in Grand Rapids where we went most recently.

While we were at John Ball, Dave and David both tried out the ropes course.

After watching them, I think I want to try it myself next time. It looks like fun! Poor Wade really wanted to try it too, but he’s too small. He played at the zoo’s playground instead.

David also liked the hands-on encounter with the stingrays. It’s kind of hard to pet a stingray when they swim away so fast, but he tried.

We discovered at the other zoo that Wade isn’t very fond of animals. He didn’t like being inside the Budgie bird exhibit at John Ball Zoo.

We did manage to get Wade to pet a sleeping pig at the petting zoo. But only because it wasn’t moving.

Kellogg Bird Sanctuary

A few days later we visited the Kellogg Bird Sanctuary near Gull Lake. There were more animals much to Wade’s dislike. He ran away screaming from a Canadian Goose. Eventually he did try feeding the birds, as did David.

I love this next picture. It really captures how pretty it is at the Bird Sanctuary. Notice that you can see the trees in the background are beginning to change color ever so slightly.

Grand Rapids Public Museum

The next stop on our Stay-cation was the Public Museum in Grand Rapids. David tried out this old-fashioned bicycle.

Then he got behind the reins of an old horse-drawn trolley.

Thank goodness that wasn’t a real horse.

David also got to play this little accordion. Let me just say accordion lessons are not in his future.

Wade put on a puppet show for us at the museum.

At the end of last week we had three days of hot, humid temperature in the 90’s. That’s kind of unusual for the first of September around here. So for our very last stay-cation day we took advantage of the hot weather, and spent one more day at the beach. We returned to Silver Beach in St. Joseph. It was one of our favorite places we visited this year. I didn’t take any pictures that day. I left the camera at home, and just soaked up every moment of the last day of summer.

Now today it’s 64, raining and gray. Good-bye summer. See you next year!

We Stay-Cationed in West Michigan all summer. It’s a great place to visit when it’s not snowing! Come see all the places we visited.