Alrighty, I’ve already shown you some photos from Cheekwood Gardens as well as photos of my totally-necessary-and-wonderful-sourvenir yarn and the Nashville Zoo. Here are just a few remnants from last week’s vacation (two weeks ago already?) to round out your vicarious adventures.

There were some neat sculptures along a wooded path in Cheekwood Gardens. Here you see my Fiasco befriending a tortoise sculpture, my mom demonstrating the power of another sculpture, my favorite sculpture showing a body/tree trunk, and my Fiasco and Dad trapped with T-rex arms in chairs too small for their shoulders (just because it’s adorable).

By the end of a week in Nashville I was more than a little sick of country music but here are photos of the outside of the Grand Ol’ Opry, a stylin’ dress from within the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Elvis’s totally reasonable gold-plated, diamond-dusted vehicle.

I lived in Florida for a year in between my undergrad and grad school days, during which time I made a very dear friend Candice, shown here with her fiance, Greg. I had only been able to see her once in the past 5 years so it was awesome to get to see her again, however briefly! We headed to the woods for a hike where we saw rivers, old Native American forts, and idyllic farmhouses.

The Fiasco and I took advantage of our time alone on the trip to see more streams, happy smiles, neat water-carved rocks, and big ol’ trees with gnarly roots.

Finally, for no reason whatsoever other than it seemed A Thing To Do In Tennessee, we visited the Jack Daniel’s whiskey distillery. The Fiasco dislikes whiskey and I only vaguely remember drinking some that was passed around at a party once so it’s not like we were big fans but now I’m curious. We couldn’t taste any at the distillery because it’s located in a dry county (ironically hilarious!) but the tour was still pretty interesting and it was free so I’d recommend it if you have an hour. I couldn’t take photos of inside the main parts but shown above is the visitor center, the Fiasco sniffin’ some filtered whiskey, the place where they burn sugar maple wood to make their filtering charcoal, our tour guide Dusty sitting in front of the water that is used to make the corn mash whiskey is distilled from, a cool chair made of old whiskey barrels, a bald cypress tree because I LOVE cypress trees and I miss them (they don’t grow in the north but I did my undergrad thesis on them and think they’re awesome, and yes I go to a distillery and take photos of the trees), and finally, a photo of the barrel house which was pretty impressive inside. Did you know that whiskey has to age 4-6 years before it’s ready? Now you do!

Phew! That got a little rambly towards the end there, didn’t it? Hope you enjoyed it anyway and are having a fabulous holiday weekend!

It’s either the biologist or the child in me (most likely both) that makes me really love zoos. I feel like I should hate zoos or feel more guilty about these wonderful “wild” animals being held captive for our viewing pleasure. However, zoos have played important roles in conservation and in many cases if the animal wasn’t in a zoo, it would be in danger of poaching or extinction through more widespread, long-term, and very real threats like climate change and habitat loss. So really, in light of how the planet is pretty much going to break down and go haywire someday, keeping a few well-cared-for gibbons in an enclosure designed specifically for their needs doesn’t seem so bad.

Man, that got dark (I should probably lay off the dystopian novels). Here are some animal photos from the Nashville Zoo to cheer you up!

We saw very athletic gibbons, playful cloud leapords, the rare and unusual ostrich flower, and the original angry bird.

 

They had one of those enclosures where you can go in and feed I-totally-forgot-what-kind-of-bird some nectar, I love those things. This photo shows me, my little-cousins-who-feel-like-siblings Megan and Austin, my kinda-freaked-out-Dad, and my dear Fiasco.

And some final photos, on top is my aunt and cousin Austin with their buddy the giraffe and a photo observing my family observing the giraffes. Bottom left is my Fiasco attempting to convince Austin to eat a bacon-cheddar-flavored cricket (yes, cricket). Bottom right is the Fiasco’s face after Austin wisely refused and he ate the cricket himself. Mwahahaha oh man, it cracks me up every time.

I hope you enjoyed our little trip to the zoo! What’s your favorite zoo animal?