Lazy 5 Ranch!

We celebrated Ansley's birthday Friday with a visit to The Lazy 5 Ranch!  It's a drive through ranch located in Mooresville, NC (about an hour north of Rock Hill).  You can drive your car through or you can pay a little more to ride a horse drawn wagon that includes feed buckets, so you can feed all the animals!  Our visit definitely started out on the wrong foot...or shall I say I started our trip on the wrong foot.  As soon as everyone loaded onto the wagon, the leader of the tour explained how all of the animals were to be fed.  Birds could peck out of your bucket, animals on four legs eat out of your hand, for some animals you needed to throw the food on the ground, and then others you dropped food into their mouths.  Well, he pulled out into the pasture and we had our chance to feed for the first time!  The majority of the animals around were tall ostrich, so I put the feed bucket over the wagon for one to come and peck....when out of nowhere this large moose thing (this could be an exaggeration, as there were no moose there but you get my drift) came charging to my food.  He then latched onto my bucket and after a little tugging (obviously he was considerably stronger than me), bye bye food bucket...at our very first stop.   It wasn't a fair fight!  Well, since my hands were free at that point I decided to pull out the camera.  I take then lens cap off, put it in my lap, only to have it roll right off, onto the wagon floor below, then roll directly behind my legs and onto the ground...surrounded by pigs and ostrich.  At this point we were about a minute into our wagon ride and I had managed to lose 2 very important things...luckily my husband is a patient man and after I steamed for about 30 seconds, we both had a nice laugh and the rest of the trip was such a success!!

white dear

little baby ostrich

zebra

The nice lady in the yellow shirt here offered one of their buckets to us and I told her 'thank you, but no', I would take it as a sign that we weren't meant to feed that day.  I think Ansley was more comfortable sitting on the outer edge without me feeding animals.

water buffalo

giraffe...our camera wasn't on much of a zoom here, these things were really that close

It was HOT outside!

Yum!

It really was a great trip!  One I'm sure we'll take again when Ansley is a little older.  They also have a petting zoo and lots of smaller animals you can walk around to look at.  There was a pig pen with little baby piglets that were the absolute cutest things.  I also made friends with an older white headed lady sitting beside us who was an absolute hoot!  Grandmas are my people, and she definitely kept me entertained!