Reptiles, and rainy days

We drove to Monroe this morning through torrential rain, and although it took us an hour to get there, the girls were great until the last ten minutes which was a combination of screeching, bickering, and demands for food. Ah well. At least I didn’t get so enraged that I turned round and drove home, but it was getting close…

Because it was so wet and cold, we’d all put on warm clothes, which was a bad idea given that after a 30-second dash into the reptile zoo, everything was indoors, and in tropical heat. So for the next hour the kids got pinker and pinker, as they petted tortoises, and oohed and aahed at different snakes and lizards.

I learned more things. There’s only one poisonous snake in the world (toxic to touch, rather than venomous, which involves delivering poison through a bite). There’s a python in the zoo called Monty, and it took La Serpiente to recognize the pun there.

And there’s a crocodile that eats porcupines, and various lizards that are cannibals, and unlike spiders where it’s the male who gets eaten, in the spirit of gender equality the bigger lizard eats the smaller, whether that’s male eating female or female eating male.

After our excursion, we went into Monroe and dined at Red Robin, which has serviceable burgers and chicken nuggets, and the worst pizza I’ve eaten this year. They also have enormous sundaes, so that was the girls satisfied.

We drove home, a repeat of the journey out, then I took La Serpiente to her vision therapy, came home, sacked out on the sofa and woke to find Frogmorton sleeping on my feet. Closer to sleeping on my lap, and yet so far away…