To the big city

After a quiet July 4th here, we headed for a nice hotel in the big city for a few days. We were thankful for an opportunity for a change of scenery. They even had sausage and orange juice for breakfast every morning at the hotel!

As you can see from these pictures, we also really enjoyed the pool there a couple of afternoons.

Before coming overseas, we really enjoyed going to the zoo. So we were glad for an opportunity to visit a zoo here.

Beth and Elijah, looking at the monkeys:

Here is Micaiah, holding some peanuts. We bought these as we were going in to feed the monkeys. (This was our first mistake.)

We also fed the elephants one of these peanuts...next mistake. After Micaiah had given an elephant a peanut, I (David) turned away to give another child a peanut. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the elephant's trunk begin prodding at Micaiah. Then, it grabbed the bottom of her dress, pinching it with the end of it's trunk. It was able to pick her up a bit - her dress lifting her legs. Then, she flipped down and popped her forhead on the concrete floor. Both she and I were very alarmed; I scooped my screaming girl up and we got away from that cage.

These elephants were behind bars, but there was no secondary fence to keep you from getting as close as you wanted. Apparently we were too close. After Elijah's recent head whack, we weren't too worried about real damage because her knot wasn't nearly as bad as that, but Micaiah was sore for several days after. We are thankful that God is watching over us through all of these incidents. They're more frequent than we'd like!