Wednesday morning Jan and I headed off to the St. Louis Zoo. Many of our friends over the years have told us we were nuts, but we’ve always visited zoos wherever we’ve traveled, even before we had kids. We also have a special connection to this zoo, since George Johnson was director of their education center a number of years ago. We had a short time to walk through their famous 1904 flight cage and some of the other bird exhibits before we took off for De Soto about one hour’s drive to the south.
Great Egret .......................................... and some kind of Cormorant
Some tropical ground bird...............................................and a Kookaburra.
Why De Soto? Paul Pallazolla, the oldest of our next-door neighbors’ three kids was sixteen when we first moved to Costa Mesa in 1977. Imagine our surprise when we learned that Wednesday was his 50th birthday! His sisters are now in Connecticut (Maria, whom we saw with her family a few weeks before leaving New York) and Philadelphia (that’s Gina, whom we didn’t get to see). So we went to De Soto to see Paul and his wife Mandy, and their two kids, David and Lauren, whom we’d never met.
Lauren, Paul & Mandy and their De Soto Home.
They have a lovely home on the shore of a community lake where they can boat, fish and swim, we had lunch and stayed and chatted into the evening, it was a wonderful visit. Although we hadn’t been together in about thirty years and had many years of catching up to do, it felt as if we’d just seen them a few months ago.
- Lauren, Paul, Mandy & Jan Lauren and David
We headed back to St. Louis in time to share a fashionably late Manhattan with George & Barb, this was our last evening with them before leaving for Iowa City in the morning.
George does his magic...