Today I headed back from Sheffield to London. We made stops in Woburn and Windsor. That was after a trip up to Rotheram for a meeting (which I did not attend but Jessica did).

While Jessica went for her meeting I sat in a coffee shop, had breakfast, watched episode 1 of the Tin Man miniseries. and began work on my Discovery Packet for my Life Coach Kim Ann Curtin. Kim and I are working together on her blog and my life. She is an awesome coach and I look forward to working with her and her blog The Coach Shoppe.

While I was at the coffee shop I was introduced to an English sandwich called the bacon sandwich. It contains… you guessed it… BACON! But that is all it contains. So I had a sandwich of bacon on a baguette this morning. It was pretty tasty. I prefer my bacon more crunchy but that isn’t happening.

After Jessica was finished with the meeting we headed to London. Along the way we saw a sign for the Whipsnade Zoo. Jessica turns to me half jokingly and says, “you want to go check it out?” Now I love me a good zoo and taking animal photos so said sure! We then got off the road and followed the signs for the Whipsnade Zoo but ended up at the Woburn Safari Park. What are the chances of getting off the road for one zoo but finding an entirely different one in the same area?

We decided to go in to the Safari and we even bought one of the CD’s to tell us about the animal areas. There were tons of animals and I took a ton of photos of them. I Posted them to Flickr but need to weed out a few and rotate some and give them all titles and some more tags, but they are up and it is nearing 1:00am here in London. You can see my set here at Woburn Safari Park.

At the park we drove along and saw Rhinos, Zebra, Giraffes and they roamed around in their areas and were very close to the cars. There were rangers in orange “stripey” Landrovers. We then went into the areas where there were tigers and then bears and wolves. We saw sleepy bears and sleepy tigers and then came to the Lion enclosure. The lion enclosure is 32 acres and there is a large pride of lions. The rangers never get out of their Rovers in this enclosure and round up the lions to their sleeping quarters like sheepherders using their landrovers. We saw them doing some of this later on. While int he enclosure we noticed a couple of lions looking through the fence. We got closer and saw that they were stalking a monkey on the other side of the fence. About 7 lions followed the monkey back and forth along the fence. It was interesting to see.

We moved on and saw more zebra and giraffes as well as Asian Elephants. Then we went through the monkey area. In the monkey area there were three or four species of monkey. We rolled up on a troop of them by the side of the road. A couple even jumped up on the car which freaked Jessica out a bit but she kept wanting them to come sit on the car.

We made one pass through the park and stopped at a walking area. There was a gift shop as well as restaurant and other amenities. We found the Monkey Business area and went in. This enclosure had free roaming Squirrel monkeys and they were so cute. I could get very very close to take their photos. They got very close to us and super close to Jessica as one of the monkeys jumped from a post to her shoulder. She screamed and moved quickly. The monkey jumped off. I wasn’t quick enough to get a clear photo but in this one you can see the monkey’s paw in her hair.

Jessica recovered nicely though.

The whole safari adventure was an excellent one and we ended up staying till near closing time because we were enjoying it so much. We took a second pass through the park and this time the lions were fiesty. The rangers in the Rovers had much to do herding the lions. The lions began randomly (to us) fighting each other and then running off. Each time one ran off the rover would follow it and try and bring it back. This meant the other lions could get close to the cars (something the rovers prevented as well) It was very cool to see lions so close up.

We did many more cool things but I’ll have to put up descriptions for all the photos to let you read about what we did. You can access the Woburn Safari Park Gallery to see more.

After the Safari Park we drove to Windsor. Jessica drove while I weeded out the bad photos from the park. I also passed out asleep fingers on the mouse buttons. I was tired… very, very tired. We got to Windsor, parked and took a walk along the Thames and up to Windsor Castle to take photos. The flag was up so someone was in residence. We came back down the hill and met up with two of our collegagues and had dinner at the Bel and Dragon. I loved their logo and the food was pretty tasty as well. I took shots of my meal as well as the logo. They are on Flickr.

Well it is nearing 1:00am and I have a flight in the morning so I’m going to cut this a bit short and let the photos do the talking for me. Check out my photostream from England.