They sent me to Oklahoma for work last week. It was no Guatemala, but I’ve found that I can turn just about anything into an adventure, even a three-day solo trip to danger-chart-topping Oklahoma towns. Plus? I’m my own most favorite travel companion, because traveling alone means I get to do whatever the shit I want to do and I don’t have to confer with anyone about what to get for dinner and I can take my happy, critter-loving, Snow White ass to the zoo and spend as much or as little time as I want staring at grizzly bears and meerkats.
And speaking of meerkats, I think they know something we don’t and I’m 85% sure it’s about an alien invasion that might be imminent. I spent a solid five minutes looking at the meerkats at the Tulsa Zoo and those little dudes spend a lot of time staring into the sky with a slightly terrified look on their little meerkat faces looking at absolutely nothing. I kept trying to figure out what they were looking at, getting down on my knees to see things from meerkat level, to see what the shit they were seeing in the sky, but there was nothing. NOTHING. No birds of prey coming to eat their little meerkat faces off, no planes, no trees, not even a fucking cloud, and yet there they were, a whole meerkat grouping staring at the sky in mild terror, glancing at me every now and then in what was either reverence to my Snow White status or a warning glance.
I even asked those little fuckers what the hell they were staring at and they didn’t tell me, but just kept staring at the space behind my head, into the blue, cloudless sky, and so the only logical thing I can determine is that meerkats don’t speak English and also, aliens are preparing to invade and the meerkats might be the only ones who can see them hanging out up there and no one is taking them seriously because they’re meerkats and so, when the aliens come, it’s gonna be me and the meerkats telling you that we fucking told you so.
Anyway.
I like zoos.
A lot.
Chances are, if I’m traveling to a new city and they have a zoo, I will find time to visit the zoo. That’s just how I work. If Megan and I had more time driving across the country, I probably would have dragged her with me to each and every zoo between here and Oregon.
Really, I just like critters and zoos are great places to hang out and stare at critters even though I do always have this slight nagging in the back of my mind telling me to release them all so we can go live happily ever after in some fairy tale land. How I haven’t managed to go on a liberation spree at the zoo is something I pride myself on because it shows I do have some impulse control, although the older I get, the more it seems to fade so my future probably involves critter liberation and also maybe prison.
Anyway.
The zoo. I like it. A lot.
At the Tulsa Zoo, you can ride a camel. So I did. Of course. The camel I rode was named Ella. She had beautiful eyelashes and was a very nice camel. I like it when I get to touch and pet and meet any sort of critter at the zoo, even (ESPECIALLY) goats, and I’ve never gotten to ride a camel before, so I was pretty beside myself with Snow White glee at the chance to spend some time riding Ella.
Along with Ella and the alien-invasion warning meerkats, I also spent a decent amount of time staring at a grizzly bear, a sand cat, the elephants and some arctic foxes.
I was also nearly killed by a roving goose colony at the zoo because geese fucking hate me. One tried to eat me on my 30th birthday, so it’s a whole thing, this goose versus me thing. And no shit, we spotted each other, these geese and me across from the snack shop, and I stopped and stared at them and they all stopped and stared at me and I realized I was going to have to pass them to get to the sea lions and the meerkats and so I did, but it was a very tense few minutes and all I could think about was how good the fat one in the middle one would taste for Christmas dinner.
I know it looks like the three trail geese in that last photo aren’t paying any attention to me, but I assure you they’re just acting distracted for the camera and the minute before I snapped that picture they were glaring at me with their menacing goose eyes. That one in the front is clearly their leader and he wasn’t going to play any games and wanted his intentions for my blood to be perfectly clear.
The rest of my time in Oklahoma outside of the zoo was spent working some solidly long days, but I did also get a pedicure and have a whole conversation in the parking lot of this strip mall with a nifty sort of bird I’d never encountered before. I got some weird looks from the locals as I was kneeling in the parking lot talking to a bird, but they live in Muskogee, Oklahoma and I do not give one single fuck what they think.
