The House of Goodwill field trip

It was my son’s 20^th birthday.  

The question: what’s a fun way to celebrate a birthday together when the participants are between the ages of 2 and 51?  Oh, and it’s COVID-19 time, so some possibilities are limited?

Since swimming, boating, grilling and all other lake-type activities are normal, daily experiences at The House of Goodwill, we wanted to do something different.  (The third best kind of “problem?”)

When I was telling a friend we bought the house, and where it was located, she told me about a safari zoo near the house she said we HAD to visit.  Since our foster kids visit family on the weekends, I thought I’d try to save it for a time when they’d be with us, since it sounded like one of those rare things that people of every age would enjoy.

So we discovered the answer to how to celebrate his birthday: it’s called The Tennessee Safari Park, and wow, what a PERFECT summer/birthday COVID-friendly day out!

The Tennessee Safari Park is a drive-through zoo in Alamo, Tennessee, where you buy buckets of food, then the animals come up to your car window to feed from your bucket.

You get to feed giraffes, llamas, ostriches and deer, amongst other animals.  You also drive past animals you can’t feed – they may bite – but you still get to see up close, like zebras and bison and boars.

It’s a good long drive, and when you’re finished there’s also a small walk-through zoo with monkeys, kangaroos and lemurs.  There’s a place to pet goats, a walk-through parakeet enclosure (where the birds will sit on your fingers or shoulders, if you want them to) and a playground area for little kids.  Peacocks roam around the grounds freely.

Although I’ve visited lots of zoos, I’ve never experienced so many animals that closely before, or had opportunities to feed so many.  It was so much fun.

Funny side note: We took this trip in our 2004 Toyota Sequoia, the “newer” of our two vehicles.  

(Only sixteen years old!)  Though it doesn’t have the kinds of issues that my car does, it just recently developed one weird quirk: when the car is parked with the engine running – or just driving slowly – the air conditioning quits working.  Driving through town, or on the highway, you’d never know there was a problem.

But driving though a safari park, where we were continuously stopping, or driving very slowly, in 95 degree heat – we had no AC.  Come to think of it, it wasn’t really that funny.

And it definitely wasn’t a “good problem.”  But we had fun anyway!

When you plan your stay at The House of Goodwill, you should definitely visit the Safari Park!  Just make sure to travel in a car with functional air conditioning…