So this weekend Brandon, the Beavers, Cubs and I went to Jungle Cat world for a sleep over and it was awesome! The conditions was wet and cold but thankfully the kids were dressed properly though some still did get some wet feet after getting stuck in the deep mud. We all arrived around 5:45pm Saturday, some of the leaders were there earlier and got the orientation and I was briefed as we walked to our respective cabins. 4 girls + 4 leaders in one and 16 boys + 2 leaders in another lol. I did expect the worst but more on that later.
After a quick pizza dinner the show started and first the meet and greet with the smaller animals in a classroom setting. The kids got to get up close with a bunch of pretty cool creatures and I even got to pet the female kangaroo! When we did the night walk around the zoo, it was too dark for the SLR, I brought my PVS-14 with me along with the small FLIR Scout scope so I took some pictures with those things. 😉 The dens of the wild animals are heated so they’re not cold at night. Anyway we got to see some large cats up REAL close!!! It was also fun to hear either the lions or tigers roaring, frankly it was rather spooky and I’d definitely be worried if I heard something like that in the wild.
It was cute, the kids were able to get the wolves to howl as well and that was fun. We got them back to their bunks by 12 and of course they didn’t want to go to sleep, I had to walk back and forth the cabin for 20 minutes before most of them went to bed. At 1:15am, one of the kids had a case of homesickness so Scouter Darcy and I talked to him for a bit to get his mind off home and it worked. Surprisingly none of the boys woke us up to go to the bathroom at night which was a surprise! What makes things more complicated is that our cabin doesn’t have bathrooms and the closest one was closed (both boys and girls) due to frozen pipes so if anyone did need to use the bathroom we’d need to walk 100 meters or so back to the main office. So happy that didn’t happen!
We were both awaken by the kids around 7:20am so we got some solid sleep which was awesome. To be fair I was awoken a few times by the roars of the cats and howls from the wolves too.
In the morning after the staff checked all the pens, we took the kids around again to see the animals in the light and the large cats were so majestic! We could get much closer than at the zoo, literally 2-3 feet away from such amazing animals. Unfortunately as you can see it was muddy in the exhibits too, poor things but I don’t think they care too much.
After lunch we called it an event and people went home. The rest of the afternoon we stuck around the house, both Brandon and I were tired and didn’t want to go anywhere. Now I’m just listening to Hardwell on the Ultra Miami live stream then going to bed early to get ready for work tomorrow. 🙂
