But today was gorgeous, warm and steady sun and we planned to make the most of it. Even though my chest cold refused to go away I had no intention of letting some here-today, gone-tomorrow virus keep me from having fun, so when Christina and Glen suggested we all head up to Belgium to visit a most unusual park I said YEAH! (pictures below)
The plan was for us to drive separately since there wasn’t enough room in any one car for the six of us. After a leisurely breakfast Susan and I head headed off to get our car out of the garage, turned on the GPS and headed out of the city. An hour or so later, after driving around much of southern Belgium, we found the parking lot for the park Pairi Daiza (and yes, it was originally called Paradise).
Our credit cards wouldn’t work in the automatic ticket kiosks so we had to go to one of the ticket booths. It all worked fine and with a little help from our phones we met up with the MacDs at the entrance.
Part zoo, part botanical garden and theme park without the rides, for the next several hours we strolled through Asia, Africa and India, several braved the crypt beneath the 13th century ruined abbey tower to have bats fly around their heads and a few of us — Liam and I abstained — chose to have their feet nibbled on by fish whose sole goal in life was to clean dead skin away. We strolled through the original 18th century mansion that now incorporates the aquarium, walked casually by fruit bats just hanging around, ate noodles at a wonderful Asian pavilion and watched red pandas having their lunch, not to mention the giant pandas and gorillas all napping during the midday heat, took a train ride around the entire park to savor the feel of Africa and just enjoyed being out in the sun along with much of the population of northern France.
And we still didn’t see everything.
That evening, after we all returned to Lille, Christina fixed a wonderful meal for us before we finished packing up in preparation for our departure the next day.
We’ll miss Lille, but more importantly we’ll miss the MacDonalds’ hospitality and generosity and especially those two kids: Liam’s ordering a bucket of mussels for dinner and Kiera ordering for us in French were two of the many high points of an all-too-short visit.
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| the only remaining part of the original 13th century abbey now houses bats |
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| storks abounded everywhere |
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| next to where we ate lunch |
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| that house in the background is the aquarium |
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| fruit bats |
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| red pandas |
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| inside the aquarium |
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