Day Three - Shopping and Animal Park!

Wednesday was a wonderful day!

It began with a full plate of garlic french toast (trust me, it was good) and a mildly spiced turkey sausage prepared by Michael. After eating I hit VisitSedona.com (the often updated Sedona Chamber of Commerce website) to pick out some things to do, having internet access on this vacation has been such a treat! Once we showered/bathed and headed out to begin the day around 10AM.

Our first stop was to Uptown Sedona. It's a touristy shopping district, lots of little southwest trading post shops, along with leather shops, crystal shops, souvenir shops and cafes and restaurants. We spent a couple hours shopping, which was more of a delight than usual. The shopkeepers were all very nice, we chatted with one of them for a few minutes while buying a couple of nice coffee mugs from his establishment.

For lunch we dined at the Vista Cantina. I went with the Sedona Burrito (Choice of flour, whole wheat or chipotle tortilla stuffed with beans, rice, shredded cabbage, cheese, tomatoes, green onions and guacamole) and Michael had the Chili con Carne. I was impressed by this lunch, it was a good Mexican meal that didn't make my stomach hurt!

After lunch we headed out toward Cottonwood to visit the Out of Africa Wildlife Park. Their website is nice, but you honestly don't know what to expect from these sorts of things, we were in for a pleasant surprise!

The drive out there was simple, we just retraced the route we came in (which means it's got a fantastic location). We arrived around 1:30, got our tickets and hopped on a tram for the Wildlife Preserve tour. I got some amazing photos of the animals during this tour, they stopped the tram several times throughout it to feed the animals some snacks and allow us to get pretty close to their cages.

After that tour they were getting ready for The Predator Feed, which they do on Wednesday and Sundays. Originally this was why I really wanted to go on the Wednesday, but when the time came to take the tram up for it we changed out mind about seeing it. There wasn't a zoo of people, but there were enough to make it less than appealing. Besides, we'd seen the predators already, no need to see them eat meat too.

Instead we decided to take the 3PM Serengeti Safari. This turned out to be a fantastic choice, there were only two other people on the tour with us! Instead of taking a bus (which was the size of a full-size schoolbus) they took us out on one of their Mercedes Unimogs. We were given extra carrots to feed the giraffes, whose heads came right into the Jeep to slobber on our hands and eat them. We were taken through the whole tour and saw a bunch of African animals, Zebras, ostriches, sable antelope. When we arrived back at the base camp area around 4PM to see the next bus loading up for the tour - it was packed!

I was especially impressed by the dedication and love that came from the woman giving the Serengeti tour. She only works there one day per week now (has a "real job" at an emergency animal hospital in Phoenix), because she "needs her tiger fix." She told us about how they once received a couple of perfectly healty young horses for "feed" for the big cats but although they feed horses to the animals regularly, they couldn't bring themselves to kill these ones because there was nothing wrong with them, they now live at the park. The same was true for a bunch of rabbits that were donated, usually they are donated dead, but somehow they received this batch from someone alive and no one would kill the cute little bunnies, so they are now building a habitat for them!

We left the park after the Serengeti tour, but not before hitting the gift shop to pick up a t-shirt, benefits from the shop all going to the caretaking of the animals.

What a fantastic time! The park in it's current location has only been open a year and a half, they moved from another location three years ago. They have plans for more exhibits including a reptile house, a macaw house and a "tiger splash arena." We'll have to return to this park the next time we're in Sodona.

We drove back to the house around 4:30 and couldn't decide what to have for dinner. So Michael hopped online and found Rene at Tlaquepaque, we made reservations for 6PM and headed out.

The dinner was amazing! We started with a couple glasses of Pighin Pinot Grigio and the Mushrooms Neptune (fresh button mushroom caps stuffed with lobster and garlic cream cheese). For an entree I had the Seitan Tofu Wellington (layers of seitan, tofu, herb pesto and mushroom duxelles wrapped in a flaky puff pastry with vegetarian bordelaise) while Michael enjoyed the Tenderloin of Venison (seared tenderloin of antelope with whisky juniper berry sauce). We finished it off with a dessert of dark chocolate torte. What a meal! I'm making myself hungry for it all again just by typing this!

We didn't get back to the house until after 8PM, at which time I was exhausted and after a nice hot bubbly bath I went to bed.