Koalas and Wombats and Kangaroos, Oh My!

There's nothing like starting off the school week with an excursion on a Monday, that's for sure. Even though they're usually filled with stress, emergency phone numbers and the fear of kidlets puking up their breakfast on the bus ride, I genuinely love excursions.

Since we've been doing a unit of work on Australia, we decided on Featherdale Wildlife Park as our excursion destination. Not too far from the school, nice and open to walk around in, and not too expensive either. Since I have such a tiny class this year and some students didn't pay, I ended up having 11 kidlets to watch all day; in other words, I was completely spoiled.

The bus ride over was fairly uneventful, thanks to a certain clever lady and her lolly game. Wait, did I say uneventful? Perhaps I forgot to mention the part where our bus was being stalked followed by a mother whose daughter was late to school and missed the bus. Nevermind the fact that her daughter a) has head lice and b) was late to school, she ended up coming along anyway. (Sigh.)

I could go on and on with the details of today's trip, but I figure I'd save you some time and stick with the more humourous highlights. And some pictures too, if the camera decides to play nice. Favourite moments would have to include witnessing a snake peeing on the shoes of its handler, patting a snake, baby wombat and koala and contemplating stealing one of their baby rabbits from the farm area. I'm also awarding the blonde moment of the day to myself (as per usual), when I couldn't figure out why all the photographs I was taking of the wallabies were turning out all black and not processing properly. Any guesses why?

Oh, and this particular part merits a paragraph all to itself. We were just about done with wandering around the park, so we washed our hands and were lurking around the side of the cafeteria building when one of the park handlers walked past with a wombat on her heels. It seemed quite tame and was quite happy trotting along behind her, at least until it got near us anyway. It was then that the scent of primary school children got up its nostrils, because it charged at one of the kidlets on the outskirts of our group and st
arted er, having fun with his ankles. The trainer hadn't noticed that the wombat was missing at this point, so it turned to the next closest person (which happened to be head-lice girl) and started attacking her feet!

To this day, it has to be the funniest thing I have ever seen on an excursion; the wombat having a ball playing with their feet, the kidlets looking terrified, and the trainer wrestling to get it off their toes. Of course while all this was happening, I was too busy giggling being shocked to take any photos, but hey. At least the kidlets will have something interesting to write about in their recounts tomorrow!

And for the record? No animals were harmed during today's adventure.



Some gloriously random picture notes;

See? Cute bunny, must steal! Can you spy the joey in the pouch? Just smile and wave boys, just smile and wave. I captured an echidna mid-step, looks like he's tap dancing. Oh, oh, and beautiful photo of the day? Definitely goes to the snoring koala. Dude. I love excursions.