Mothers Day today – we were warned not to try and go out somewhere for lunch, all the restaurants would be booked out and places such as cemeteries would be crowded with people visiting.
Jorge’s wife Patricia picked us up at 9:30am to drive us to Parque Jaime Duque, a fun park and zoo about an hour north of Bogota. We also visited here in 2009 and we enjoyed it enough that we thought it might be nice to visit again.
The drive was a bit slow until we got out of Bogota – traffic was heavy in some parts, especially around some cemeteries close to the main road out of the city.
When we arrived, we decided to hire a pram in case Andres didn’t feel like walking. Unfortunately, as we discovered a little later – the three-wheel pram they gave us had a flat front tyre and no pump, which made it virtually impossible to push him in it. As a result, I ended up carrying Andres on my shoulders for most of the day (I was getting used to this by now), but at least we were able to put our bags (including my heavy camera bag) in the pram, which made things a little easier.
We didn’t get to enjoy the zoo as much as I would have liked – Andres was in a grumpy mood and made it difficult to stay in one spot to watch the animals for very long. He did improve a bit as the day went on though.
By the time we got to the end of the zoo, we were feeling like eating lunch, so we stopped at a nearby restaurant. After falling off his chair and hitting his head, Andres was even more grumpy, but he did perk up a bit when we paid for him to go on one of the large little kids playgrounds, which had a lot of fun things to play on.
We walked back to the main fun-park area and after trying to convince Andres to go on a few rides, he decided he wanted to jump on the trampolines. We had only paid for a general admission ticket, which did not allow any free rides, so I went and found a place selling “monedas” (coins – special tokens you purchase for rides and other activities) and purchased enough for him to go on the trampolines. Fortunately it wasn’t that busy at the fun park, so he was able to go a lot longer than normal. They actually had four trampolines separated by padded walkways, so he was able to run along, jump on one trampoline, then roll over the walkway and onto another trampoline. He had a great time doing somersaults and jumping around.
After his time was up, we walked over to the train station and caught the scenic train which does a tour of the park on an elevated railway.
Finally, we decided to head home – due to some road closures, we took a rather scenic route which we hadn’t been on before, which was nice – but took quite a while to get back. It ended up being after 6:30pm before we arrived back at the hotel and dinner had already started!
We all went to bed early, exhausted from the day’s outing.
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