Our third day in Texas was actually spent in Louisiana! Longview, TX is only about 65 miles from the Louisiana border so we decided to take a trip there and add another state to our road trip bucket list.
While we were in Louisiana, we visited an awesome animal park called Gators & Friends. This place was really fun. We got to see all sorts of exotic animals as well as a bunch of Gators!
The kids even got to hold one of the baby alligators.
They said it was actually heavier than it looked. They were really excited to get up close with a gator. Thankfully its strong little mouth was taped shut or we might be missing some fingers.
The gator pond was full of giant adult alligators. These guys were huge! I would not want to meet up with one of them in a dark swamp somewhere. Just look at all those teeth in those strong jaws!
The best part of the park was gator feeding time. It was so intriguing, we watched it twice. The handler would attach big pieces of raw chicken to the end of this hook and then dangle it out over the alligator pond. When the alligators smelled that meat, they just went crazy. They all swarmed the feeding area coming from all over the pond. That was the scary part because they swam so smoothly that they just looked like logs floating in the water. Then one would literally jump out of the water and grab the chicken. Snap!!
As you can see, they would fly out of the water to get the meat. That was not the only shocking part though. When you heard the sound their jaws made when they clamped down on the meat, your blood ran cold. The snapping sound was so loud that you just knew he would break your bones if he got you. It was so mesmerizing just watching this feeding frenzy. Truly amazing and terrifying.
In addition to seeing the alligators, we also saw some of their exotic friends.
There were many different kinds of deer that we got to feed and pet. We bought two feeding cups with our admission and the kids had a blast feeding all of the deer. The deer were very pampered. As soon as they saw us coming, they ran to the fence because they knew they were going to get fed. They didn't even care if we pet them either.
We also got to pet and fed some of other exotic animals like Kangaroos:
A zebra, a Scottish Highland Cow, Cabybara, lemurs, llamas, and lots of funny goats including some with four horns! We walked around this exotic petting zoo for hours because the kids loved seeing all of the animals.
Their favorite animals were the emu and the cabybara. Emily loved the emu because her nickname at school is Emoomoo. I don't know why but the name stuck with her in 5th grade.
The boys loved the cabybara because it is the largest rodent in the world. I guess they read a book about it in school so they knew all sorts of facts. Colby said it was actually bigger than he thought it would be. This cabybara was kind of funny to watch. Of course being Texas and Louisiana, it was really hot and humid this day as well. The cabybara was not stupid, he basically sat in his swimming hole the whole time we were watching him. He would climb out for a minute and walk around and then realize it was still hot and dive back into the water.
After exploring the park, we bought an alligator head as a souvenir. (We will worry about how we are going to get it home on the plane later I guess...) We were thoroughly melting in the humidity, so we decided to head back to Texas and Traci's air conditioned house. On the way we stopped at Sonic for some Slushies. It was the perfect end to the day.
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