South Lakes Safari Zoo

As it was a girls' weekend we decided to go an visit the South Lakes Safari Zoo. It was only £2 each to get in with online pre-booking!

When we got there we decided to treat ourselves to tiger feeding as its something neither of us had done before. Before that we had an hour to wander around. Here is a little video of our day out:

#CountryKids at South Lakes Safari Zoo

My poor son was dragged to Barrow with me far too early on a holiday as I had to go into school to prepare for the children coming back tomorrow. He did enjoy investigating my classroom but I decided to treat him to a free trip to the South Lakes Safari Zoo on the way home! We hadn't been for over a year since September 2015 so it was good to go back - an extra bonus for it being free...

The first new thing we found was the baby giraffe who was born on Christmas Day:

Then I persuaded my son to go through the walk through safari (the emus are quite intimidating!). Luckily they stayed away from us this time and it was only the Rheas who got up close:

The adorable prairie dogs were right up to the edge of the path making the most of the feed that people had put out:

#CountryKids at Lakeland Wildlife Oasis

With it being nice at the weekend my mum and I decide we needed to all get out and make the most of it. The hard thing was getting everyone to agree so in the end we headed to the Lakeland Wildlife Oasis which isn't too far away on the A6. We hadn't been since before my son started school so it had been a while!

When we arrived it was just about time for the meet the bugs talk so we headed to the inside exhibits first. These take you through a fascinating journey through evolution:

My son's favourite shell

There was plenty of hand on stuff including this magnifying glass:

Examining bugs close up

Or this bugatelle where your choices of things such as number of legs resulted in a different bug at the bottom. Both my two had several goes on this:

Bugatelle

#CountryKids at South Lakes Wild Animal Park

On Sunday we took advantage of the virtually free entry to South Lakes Wild Animal Park to go and see what has changed in the last 2 years. There are so many different rare species that are used to breed to replace ones being threatened in the wild. Here are a few of my favourite snaps of the day:

Lion

Sleeping Fennec fox

Penguin

Praire Dog

Christmas at South Lakes Wild Animal Park

It's been just over a year since I first went to the South Lakes Wild Animal Park so I was very pleased to win a full Christmas Experience visit there from my local free paper The Citizen. If we had been able to go on a Saturday then it would have started with a breakfast with Father Christmas but on a Tuesday this wasn't available.


So we started off with taking our free animal feed to the emu and wallaby enclosure. As you can see on some of the photos below my children took great delight in feeding the permitted animals:

Customize a free picture collage

Then we partook of a much needed free hot drink in the Maki restaurant before exploring more of the Park. It is full of a wide variety of rare and endangered breeds that the Park are captive breeding. Despite the cold plenty of the animals were out and about for us to see. 

We had a couple of attempts at trying to go skating and had to retreat to the restaurant for our Christmas lunch. Unfortunately there was a a big rush due to the one and only downpour we had all day. This meant we had to wait quite a while to be served but once it arrived it was delicious. It was extra festive to get a cracker to pull whilst enjoying it! There was a little gap until we had a confirmed skating spot so we headed off to see the giraffes and reindeer. My daughter enjoyed feeding both species and my son just fed the reindeer (got to make sure Santa's sleigh gets here on Xmas Eve!).