West Midlands Safari Park

Whilst we were away with Single with Kids the group booked to go to West Midlands Safari Park. By booking online a day before we saved quite a bit of money. With it not being half term in Worcestershire we were pleasantly surprised that the park was all set up for its Spooky Halloween spectacular with lots of scarecrows:

  

The first living creature we encountered was a penguin. It's amazing how long boys aged 9-12 spent watching it swimming around the pool:

Most of us then visited the rather smelly bats! It did make us duck when they swooped down low over our heads in the dark... The boys were all fascinated by the reptiles too:

The park not only has exhibits about living creatures but also long extinct ones such as dinosaurs:

Inside were moving dinosaurs and information boards about the many different species that existed over time. The Tyrannosaurus Rex roar was pretty awesome:

As we had to wait until 11:30 for the rides to open we headed back to the cars to drive through the safari park. It was amazing to get so close to some of the animals:

As the park wasn't too busy it wasn't that difficult to get close up to them all. Not all of them were very active as it was quite a cold day. The wild dogs must have been a bit too active as there was a long delay to get into their enclosure! Some of the other carnivores were easier to photograph though:

There were times when the non-carnivorous animals were pretty intimidating due to their size or speed:

I did get a chance for what my son referred to as a dad joke when we encountered a zebra crossing:

Then we headed back to the rides (we had bought advance tickets for these too). They had various minimum height grades for rides but my son was way above all of them:

With rides to suit all levels of bravery we ended up spending several hours in this part of the park. Some of them were too scary for me! We did also end up very wet...

I did manage to see the meerkats before they were shut in for the night:

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Meerkat

A post shared by Becky Willoughby (@lakessinglemum) on Oct 21, 2019 at 8:14am PDT

We didn't visit many of the shows but did manage to get to the sea lion encounter. Each of the sea lions spent about 5 minutes demonstrating the tricks they had learned whilst the keepers gave us lots of fascinating information about them:

The boys wanted to do more rides so we went back for more and got even wetter as we did the two water rides for a finale! All in all a great family day out.