And one last Louisiana post

 

We woke up this morning to a horrible rainstorm and hurriedly got ready to go amidst lots of tornado warnings and the kids asking “Will a tornado come and hit us?”

 

YES!  And it’s going to fly us far away!  Okay, I didn’t really say that, but there was times I was tempted to answer like that.

 

There were several times as we drove that nearly stopped for the rain, but just as I said let’s find a safe place it’d let up for a while.

 

Ummmm……  That would be a video of the tornado that came through the town today after we left.  My aunt just shared it with me.

After it had cleared up a bunch we stopped in Ruston for the Northern Louisiana Military Museum.  The boys LOVED it.  They walked excitedly from case to case asking about all the different soldier paraphernalia to find out what it was.

 

 

 

I think my favorite display was the chaplain display they had for World War 2

 

It just cracked me up to see this nice calm chaplain praying in the scene and then this sign.

Yes, I have a screwy sense of humor sometimes.  Okay, often.

But, the high point for the kiddos was getting to actually touch and climb on some of the old military vehicles.  You know old tanks, helicopters, all sorts of decommissioned stuff.  What could make a better playground than things used for blowing stuff up?

From there we drove an hour or so to find the Gator and Friends Exotic animal zoo.  We had tried going out there on our way to Mississippi and it was closed, but it was going to open up again on Wednesday or something like that.  We went on in and wandered around feeding as many different animals as would come up to us.

 

Princess cracked me up, before she would feed anything she’d wait for her brothers to feed them, and then say, “Brothers did your hand get dirty?”  And only if it didn’t get dirty would she feed the silly animals.  That’s that last picture, Princess proudly holding her hand up and showing that it didn’t get dirty.

And the most amazing part?  Before leaving we each got to hold an alligator.  When we asked about it, he pulled out this burlap sack and I thought he was going to bring out a gag or something so I was expecting something to jump out at us, but it wasn’t…….

By the time he got to Mom and myself that guy was feeling feisty.  And as you can see in my picture his tail was lashing around and he was tired of being held.  Of course as soon as the guy that worked there picked him up he calmed right down.

 

Go figure.