After the accident earlier this year, we were staying local for a while and couldn’t do any long road trips. Luckily Lake Tobias is only about a 1.5 hours from our house and the kids had gotten tickets from my parents for Christmas. We planned a day trip to drive there, explore the park and have picnic lunch, then go to a local restaurant for dinner before heading home. Entrance into the park was easy and there was plenty of parking. We were moving at a casual pace since Kristen was just starting to walk around without the walker/crutches, the kids say she has less accessories now haha!
The kids love interacting with the animals, so our favorite section was the petting zoo (baby camel was by far my favorite) and the safari since we got to feed the animals. The petting zoo is an enclosed area that has some animals in pens (camels, yaks, and others) that can still be pet, but then a lot of animals like the goats are just running around out in the open. Autumn is still trying to find a way to talk us into getting a goat for our house, they’re definitely her favorite. The safari ride was long, it took about 30-40 minutes to go through the whole ride and there were a lot of times that the truck would stop for us to feed animals as they walked over. I liked young deer with their fuzzy antlers, Hope made friends with an emu that she must have fed an entire bucket of food! There was also a separate area in the park to feed the ducks/geese (the ducks are much more friendly than the geese!!) Hope loves peacocks and was intent on getting as close as possible without scaring one….she did pretty good! checkout our Facebook page for the video! The park has a really wide variety of wildlife and the enclosures seem especially large for each animal, it’s great to see that they are well cared for.
After our picnic lunch and the safari ride we walked over to the lions enclosure and giraffe feeding. The lions were fun to watch for a while because they were so active. The kids also enjoyed the giraffe feeding but Autumn was still a little too short to get the full experience. I also didn’t like the way it was organized, there were too many people trying to feed the few giraffe’s at the same time. We may be a little spoiled by our local Plumpton Park Zoo where one person at a time walks up to feed the giraffe.
We ended up staying at the park until close and even tried to make one last run to the petting zoo but missed it closing by a couple minutes. The kids got some souvenirs at the gift shop and we called it a day. The drive over to Millersburg was only about 15 minutes and we went to Max’s Sports Bar & Grille. We had to drive around the block before realizing where their parking lot was located (kind of behind the building on the upper level). They weren’t too busy for a Saturday night and we were seated right away. Dinner and dessert were delicious, they had a great variety for the kids too! Our only complaint was that we were very close to the water but they didn’t really have any views.
