The Honeymoon Adventure - Day Two - Calgary Zoo Four

Well with our upcoming adventure to Winnipeg, I figure I should get a move on with posting the rest of our honeymoon adventure. So let us continue with the next leg of the Calgary Zoo: The Dorothy Harvie Gardens.

This part may have been my favourite of all; as much as I enjoy being inside... if I'm going to be outside, it may as well be in a warm environment with lots of pretty things to look at. Now this area was quite big on large areas of growing plants and things... in retrospect, perhaps I should have taken a picture of some of the beautiful areas and arrangements of flowers and plants and things; though to be fair, it was kinda raining and/or dreary at the time. If any of you live in an area where your city grows arrangements of pretty flowers and things, then you can just imagine that, only in the middle of a Zoo.

(As a side note: if you grow your own personal arrangements of pretty flowers and garden things, I would love to see your handiwork as I've been trying for years to grow even a single flower within my house and it never seems to work out.)

Within the Dorothy Harvie Gardens area there is a building which has some neat information on scientifical such as photosynthesis and how butterflies keep themselves warm using sunlight similar to how a solar panel works. Probably even cooler than that, is that there's a huge room inside the building which is kept at tropical temperatures so that they can grow real live plants of all sorts from different places as well as keep butterflies in there.

Let me share some of what I saw:

I could have taken so many more pictures of the plants, but with there being so many plants it would have been an almost endless stream of greenery that nobody would really be able to appreciate without actually being there. As you can see, I did manage to get some neat pictures of some of the giant butterflies that were there. Of course, it can be rather difficult to get a good idea of just how big some of these flying bugs can be; so here's a video to give you a much better visual of how huge these things are.

Isn't that insane? It definitely blew my mind. There are tons of these things flying around this greenhouse-type building. They also have a space for incubating butterfly cocoons as well where you can see through the glass rows and rows of hanging cocoons, all at different points of growth from beginning up to hatching. Of course... again... I didn't think to take pictures BUT IT'S REEEEALLY COOL YOU SHOULD GO SEE IT!

If you're at all a fan of animals, then you really should go to a zoo and check it out. Maybe some people would think it's cruel to lock up animals, but seriously... how would we get a chance to see this stuff and learn about them and appreciate them if we as regular people never have a chance to really see them in person?

Stay tuned for next time when I tell you about the Eurasia section.


~ Kyle Welykholowa

Back to Honeymoon Adventure

I Survived Camping With Friends =17=

I have great news, I survived camping with friends! Surprisingly, I had a fantastic time out in the "wild" with our friends. I managed to stay off of my phone nearly the entire time except for a short time while boating when I was hanging out and watching the fishing going on; Carley caught her first fish by the way. :D It's a bit of a personal accomplishment for me to be able to spend nearly a whole four days without being all over my phone the entire time, so I have to say I'm quite proud of myself.

Considering how Carley likes to plan things ahead of time and I like to make lists... you'd think we'd be more prepared for things. As it turns out... we didn't bring our pillows for the second camping time. I'm hoping to be much more prepared the next time we go camping. I'm pretty sure we had everything we needed for Isabelle, which is great and all... but we totally forgot to be prepared for ourselves. We forgot to bring our own bug spray!

Unfortunately during the second day we were out there the zipper on our tent split so we weren't able to close our tent. For the most part this wasn't an issue, but eventually it got a little more wet out and the mosquitoes started coming out in large numbers. This wasn't too much of an issue while we had bug spray... though eventually we ran out on the last day and that's when things got really bad. Thankfully we were able to buy a tarp at the store which we were able to bungee to the front of the tent with the help of our fantastic friends.

The great news is that Isabelle had a great time (I think). She played a bunch with Ella and complained a ton that we wouldn't let her go near the fire pit, but she seemed to enjoy being outside a ton; she wouldn't go to bed when she was supposed to. I think the only night she went to bed on time was the last night only because she was so tired from the day before that she couldn't keep herself awake. Canada day in particular she only got about half an hour of sleep before getting up to go see the fireworks at 10:00 pm... which she enjoyed so much with Carley's hands over her ears that she started to fall asleep while watching them.

All in all, camping was great. Super tiring to get up so early and do so many things throughout the day including long hikes with the baby on my chest, but totally worth it. I'm confident we'll be camping again soonish.

~ Kyle Welykholowa