New Year’s Day, Chris and Sarah got up early, well, early for having stayed up so late and headed out to the Zurich zoo. He had invited anyone who wanted to come, but they were mostly all still asleep when he left. And the ones who were awake, weren’t REALLY awake, they were just no longer in bed. 🙂 We started that tradition when the kids were a lot smaller, and didn’t stay up until midnight. But now that they are older, they want to stay up and go to the zoo. Maybe next year he could leave just 30 minutes later, and we could all go together…
By the time they got back, we are all up and dressed and mostly functioning. Over lunch they told us about all the animals they had seen, how much fun it was, and how the crowd had already started to gather to watch the penguin parade an hour before it started. They used to do it in the morning, which is why we started going in the morning. No one was at the zoo, and you could get really close to the penguins, as long as you were near their house when the parade started. Now they do it at 1 in the afternoon, and everybody and his dog is there. Feels a bit like a Disneyland parade with the crowd situation. 🙁
On Tuesday we went to the Transportation Museum in Luzern. Naturally, our year passes had run out on Dec 31, so we had to buy all new ones, but we were kind of expecting that. 🙂 We met our friend T. and her two adorable boys there. Her youngest just cracks my kids up, he is such a little firecracker. And of course, he is in Alexandra’s Primary class so they are getting to be very good friends. It’s just the two of them, and their teacher. 🙂
T. was also meeting some other friends of hers with younger children, so they split off and went more slowly through the museum while her older son came with us to explore. We had such a nice time. There weren’t very many people there, so the lines for the hands-on exhibits were pretty much non-existent. At home later, several of my kids commented on what a nice boy M. is. They really liked hanging out with him.
The other ladies had brought picnic lunches, but Chris hadn’t wanted to stay all day, so we had only planned to be there a couple hours. Of course, the sun was shining, the outdoor construction playground was calling, and they were sooo sad when it was time to leave. Although the fact that they were starving helped a little. 🙂 Since we have the passes, though, it isn’t such a tragedy to leave early once in a while. We can always go back again another day. It was a great way to kick off the second week of vacation.