A good day out yesterday.

28 August

Yesterday we had a run out to West Midlands Safari Park and we had a really good day, all three of us. I came back with 190+ photos, Kile 245 but I don’t know how many Jan got. When we got home Jan uploaded Kile’s lot onto her computer and showed me some of his shots, and he really is brilliant at it. He’s using my old Sony Alpha 350, a good camera anyway, and has learned to use it and the Tamron 18-270 lens he has on it.

But it’s not just the kit; he has a good photo-eye. By that I mean he looks and sees photos that Jan and me miss, even with all our experience. His shot of the flamingo head perfectly reflected in the lake at Burton a couple of months, … shows exactly what I mean. Yesterday he did the same again with at least two shots Jan showed me as they went through them together. One was small plains antelope head down feeding, the other was a yellow ball shaped flower. Both were perfectly framed and focused, and we missed both of them. But remember, he’s only 11 years old.

We were all tired by the time we got back here but we were all ready for a decent hot drink. After we left home we didn’t have another hat drink until we got home. There’s plenty of food and drink outlets at the Park but they are expensive and not very good, actually we were not impressed with the little we had over there. They don’t have Coke-cola, only Pepsi and we’re not fussed on that one, and what we had lived down to how we feel about Pepsi, over sweet, tasteless and flat. But what really bugged me was that they don’t service any ice for cold their drinks. What tea/coffee we saw was in card cups, not our idea of fun.

The drive through part was really good now that the free ranging monkeys have gone. The animal security was excellently controlled by use of traffic lights and rolling gates at the carnivore enclosures. The vegibores was fine as well apart from us arriving and starting our tour close to the hottest part of the day and most of them were lying down in shady areas. As we headed round it became obvious to me that I needed to pee, but we are not allowed to get out of the car. The result is that we had cut it short so I could go pee and that caused us to miss around the last 30-40 minutes of the tour.

Perhaps next time we will do the amusement park bit first and do the drive through later in the afternoon, there seemed to be a lot less cars about in that area when we got back to our car. And yes, we will go back seeing as we got a ticket for free admission for our car only and the three of us. Mind you, we will make sure we have enough drinks with us next time.

Right then, photo time … 

Kile’s flamingo shot, and I make no apologies for posting it again.

Today’s funny then … Could be a problem; our internet seems to be down and I now need to try to get it going … Ha-ha, its working …

My memory's not as sharp as it used to be.  Also, my memory's not as sharp as it used to be.