My first Safari Park visit

Rob and I went up to visit James, Sal and Jack near Birmingham today. They took us to the West Midlands Safari Park, which was great. Between us, Rob and I got some great photos. Unfortunately my camera battery ran out towards the end, so I missed out on the giraffes, emus and camels - not to mention I didn't get any shots of Jack, or three-month-old Joe, who came round this evening with his Dad, Adam, to say Hi - but we managed to get some good pictures of the lions, tigers, elephants, deer, wildebeest, rhinos, wolves, zebras...

I've been meaning to blog about my new camera lens for ages - Rob bought it for me in January, and it's ace. The lens that came with my camera is an 18-55mm; the new one is a 65-300mm one. Most of the pictures we took were on the maximum zoom, and look like the animals are really close. Although we didn't need to zoom in for the picture of the lioness on the road - she came really close to the car and stopped traffic for quite a while...

Here are some of my favourite pictures:









Afterwards we went to the safari theme park next door. James, Rob and Jack went on a few of the rides - actually, they took advantage of the fact that it wasn't very busy and went on some of the rides more than once; they went on one of the water rides 6 times... We were just about to leave when the black cloud overhead couldn't hold out any longer and we got caught in a hailstorm for a few minutes, but the boys were all wet anyway from the water rides so it didn't really matter. We went back to James & Sal's for pizza, said Hi to Adam and Joe, then came home again. What a great way to spend a Saturday.

More photos are here. We took about 300 altogether, so be glad there are only 53 in the album...