WARNING: Very Long Post!

Well, we made it back today from our very busy trip. We were gone for almost a week - Carlos and I spent a couple of days in San Francisco before Matt joined us. We stayed in the bay area for a bit longer with Matt before we all continued on to Farm Sanctuary in Orland. This had to be the highlight of the trip for me; I've been wanting to visit the sanctuary for ages.

Fortunately, we recovered from the loss of our camera in time to be up and running with the new one during our Farm Sanctuary visit. Here's the part where I share lots and lots of pictures :-)

When we arrived, we checked in at the People Barn -

Carlos was happy to be there.

The scenery was very pretty.

Before we knew it, we were meeting all kinds of incredible animals.

I didn't catch this guy's name, but he's amazing, isn't he?

And here he is again with Bonnie and Waylon.

This is Lester (the same one show with Carlos above).

Next it was on to the pigs.

Our guide told us that happy pigs spend about 80% of their time sleeping. I thought it was cute how these two were spooning.

We got to pet the goats for just a few minutes before their lunch arrived; after that all we got was this rear view as they sped off to chow down.

Of course, you will probably not be surprised to hear that my favorite animals to spend time with were the turkeys, especially since two girls from this flock will soon be coming to live at our house!

I think I caught this girl in mid-song. They make the most wonderful noises!

This was one of only two male turkeys we met. He was quite friendly, and very handsome.

This sweet old girl was so friendly. She was the only one to approach me when I sat down on the ground, and she happily accepted chest and tummy scratches for quite a long time.

I love the look on the face of the turkey in the back. Doesn't she look like she knows exactly how fabulous she is?

I loved this one's head!

{sigh} I loved the turkeys. I wish I knew which ones we get to adopt, but whoever it ends up being, I'm sure we will love them to pieces. They should be arriving around the beginning of November, so you'll definitely be hearing more about that in a while.

The timing of our visit was great because Farm Sanctuary was my charity of the month for September - it was fun to be able to deliver my donation in person for once, and it was especially exciting because we did so well last month. With your help, I raised a whopping $570.00 in support of the awesome work Farm Sanctuary does on behalf of animals.

On to the rest of our trip... I suppose the other big news was that Carlos seems to finally be showing some serious interest in underpants. Hooray! He picked some out while we were on our trip, and he had fun entertaining us in the car with them.

First he just laid this pair on his head and asked me to take his picture. When he got a reaction from that, it was game on... let the underpants festivities commence.

With cousin Calvyn.

Carlos' version of a ski-mask burglar look.

Underpants everywhere!

(We got home around 3:00 p.m. today and Carlos was really excited to put on underpants for the first time. He wore them until bedtime with no accidents, so I think he's on his way to finally being potty trained. We'll see how it goes.)

The final leg of our trip took us to Redding for one night. This morning before heading home, we decided to check out Turtle Bay. We didn't know much about it beforehand, and for the most part it was pretty cool, but I was disappointed when I realized that they had so many captive live animals. It wasn't the main focus of the place, but they were here and there, and it was just so sad to see these gorgeous creatures (a fox, several owls, some kind of eagle or falcon...) in cages. For that reason, I wouldn't go back. But we made the most of it; there was a really nice playground for Carlos to enjoy, and a museum and some trails to explore. Here's Carlos on the way out the door -

Well, I'm exhausted and badly in need of some sleep so that's it for now. I'll have to write a bit more tomorrow and clue you all in about October's charity and maybe a few other things.