Thankyou

Thankyou, New Forest, and all within you. It has been a lovely couple of days! Surprisingly lovely. Thankyou my boys for being SO well-behaved, you have made me proud. Thankyou to the Bothy for looking after us, I hope we'll come back - you made us feel completely at home and for that I am hugely grateful!

Today after a couple of disappointments (both reptile centres were closed, one because they only open at half term and one which doesn't open until Easter) we called in at Lyndhurst to the Visitor Information Centre and asked where we could go to see some more animals. We thought about going to the otter sanctuary, and it turned out to be an actual Wildlife Park! Full of otters, owls, deer, polecats, wildcats, lynx, wolves, bison, foxes, wallabies, wild boar and harvest mice! And we spent four and a half hours there - about three hours longer than we expected to :) Definitely a place to go back to again and again.

"Awww" moment of the day was at feeding time for the animals. Bean wanted to know why the little asian otters were still making a racket and climbing up the fences of their enclosures. They'd already been given their food, Bear and I had watched them eat it all. Bean was sad because there was no more, he said "sorry otters, there's no more food, it's all gone now." Then we went to see the scottish wildcats (definitely not creatures you'd want to mess with) whose dinner was chicks. Pre-killed chicks, but still yellow fluffy things. Bean was really quite sad that they'd been taken away from their mummy! At this rate we'll be raising a vegetarian :-/ he already has a massively restricted diet (self imposed, I must point out) and refuses chicken and beef because he doesn't like it. Although he doesn't much like vegetables either. What label do you give to creatures who eat mainly pasta, dairy and potatoes?!