The exotic animal petting zoo...

...brought to you by....The Amish! haha. Who would of thought? Here are some pictures from our little day trip down into Amish Country:

So first we took a horse-drawn wagon wide through the ranch at 5 mph and stopping several times to feed the animals. They have over 500 different kinds of animals and birds from all over the world here. We each got a feed bucket to feed the animals.

This is a zedonk (zebra/donkey). He followed us along the entire hour-long ride


Here's an elk. Their antlers grow an inch a day! The antlers are velvety but once they rub all the velvet off (on trees) they stop growing. And fall off I guess. These antlers were huge, we were all trying to feed them and touch their antlers without getting skewered!


I think that's a llama that Noah's looking at



Noah really wanted to get off the wagon at this point


We all thought it was so fun to feed the animals and try and hold onto out buckets. The animals often tried to pull the buckets out of our hands


We were advised to feed the bigger, big horn-clad animals by dumping some feed under our seats and letting them get it themselves


Here is that animal's huge scary horn.


My favorite were the alpacas. (although this might be a baby llama)


the Zedonk


greedy little zedonk


These birds (Emu) were scary and vicious. Especially the ostriches. They'd stick their long necks halfway through the wagon and attack your bucket whether you wanted them to or not. They would even sneak up on people who were looking out the other side of the wagon!


The camel


Noah with his feed bucket. When we first got on the wagon, he was about to reach in the bucket to eat some and Mark said, "no Noah, that's not for you, it's for the animals!" Everyone laughed but poor little Noah just got embarrassed.


Water buffalo. By the way. Real mozzarella cheese is made with water buffalo milk. I once told my roommates that in college and they all made fun of me saying that was ridiculous. But it's true! so there.


After the wagon ride there was a little petting zoo as well as other animals in cages to look at (ie: monkeys, parrots, alligators, real zebras, a skunk, rabbits, etc.) There were also baby chicks that we could hold. Noah loved that--although it was a near "Of Mice and Men"-experience (Noah really wanted to squeeze them)


Before heading home, we ate at an Amish restaurant. Around the entire restaurant was a porch lined with Amish-made rocking chairs.




That was a lot of pictures. I'll post pictures from Niagara Falls next week! :)