October 3, A day at the petting/feeding zoo

I'm way behind on my blogging! Last weekend, while Doug's parents (Nonna and Pop-pop) were in Italy for the weekend, we decided to visit Berg Tierpark, a petting zoo of sorts. It was quite an interesting place. Part of it was like a big (scary) playground and the rest had all sorts of animals that you could feed and/or pet like chickens, bunnies, goats, sheep, and deer. Most animals were caged or fenced, but you could walk among the deer which was kind of neat. Gianna liked the idea of feeding them, but didn't want to get too close. In the video she says, "Go away" to the deer quite a few times, but she wasn't overly scared. I don't know if she was intimidated by the big white stag, but I was a little and the other deer definitely were! We've never seen anything like him before.

Gianna probably liked the little ferret things (see video) the most. They weren't interested in our food, but she enjoyed having long "conversations" with them, though the video doesn't really capture that.

We didn't do much of the playground stuff except play in the sand because it was definitely geared toward older kids. I can see a 5-year-old really loving it there. Doug decided to check out the slide. In this case, though, "slide" was more like a euphemism for "free-fall in a pipe"! Unfortunately there are no pictures because the slide went through the ground like a tunnel, but Doug says the descent was nearly vertical. Good thing they provide rugs so that kids can go faster on them! Yowsers!