A Very Expensive Trip to the Zoo

Chad and I decided to take Sophie to the zoo on Saturday afternoon since the weather was gorgeous. We went ahead and bought a membership since we plan on going some during the week this summer. Sophie is free until she is two so we just got the dual membership ($55) and left the second adult as a "guest". That way mom can go with me for free (or anyone else who wants to join us). Chad even found a coupon online for $12 off so we really got a good deal.

The expensive part comes about 15 minutes into the zoo trip when we were in the "Lorikeet Landing" bird sanctuary. Just so you know, these are just medium sized parrots - not anything big or scary. Anyway, there are about 50 of them just flying around in the cage and you can go in and feed them and touch them (if they let you). Sophie was loving it!! We had been there for a little while and the birds started flying by pretty fast (I was beginning to get a little uneasy about it). We were watching one that had landing on a man's arm when it suddenly flew off towards us (at least I thought so at the time). I was holding our camera and screamed (bet you can't guess what I said) as I threw it down (I think I closed my eyes too). The camera was laying there in two pieces with all kinds of inside parts showing. Did not look good...

Chad gave me a very disapproving look, but wasn't too mean about it (I was almost in tears). He lightened the mood by saying that he was glad I wasn't holding Sophie. It was hard not to think about it the rest of the time, but I managed to still have a good time since Sophie was having so much fun. She chased the goats in the petting zoo area and "loved" on them. She loved the monkeys and the elephants (and the birds). We rode the carousel with her even though we almost didn't since it was $2 a token and didn't think it was worth it. She just seemed so excited when she saw it and we knew we couldn't just pass up fun things anymore without her noticing. She was so cute (too bad we don't have a picture). 

So the camera is ruined. It was mainly the lens that we saw the inside parts, but the body is cracked and the memory card won't stay in (either that or it gets stuck). We may go ahead and send it to Nikon to get an estimate to fix it, but I assume the cost will be more than just buying a new one. With Easter coming up, I didn't want to take a chance of being without a camera so we ordered one on Amazon last night. They have discontinued the D40 that we have (although you can still find them for sale) so we decided to go with the D3000. It is closer to the D60 (also discontinued) with a higher megapixel than our D40. We don't use any fancy stuff on the camera so we decided to go with the best price. Urgh...still not we had planned to spend money on right now.

So that is how the zoo trip got a little more expensive than we planned...