Drive-Thru Safari

Over the weekend last weekend, the wife and I loaded up the family in the family cruiser and made our way to the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center (and buffet) in lovely Glen Rose, TX.

This place is just exactly like it sounds like. You drive down this trail and see tons of animals freely roaming this big fenced in area. I think the trail is a little over nine miles long and the speed limit is like 10 or 15 mph. So the trip takes you a couple of hours if you stop and get pictures and feed the animals. Of course you can’t get out of the car and were told many, many, MANY times not to get out of the car.

In the area there is also a state park where you can see/play in fossilized dinosaur footprints along with a place called Dinoworld that has life sized replicas of dinosaurs. Not far from all of this is a nuclear power plant that you can tour and did I mention that Glen Rose is not far from Stephenville, where last year people saw UFOs. We were an Elvis sighting away from hitting the weird shit lottery!

Back to the drive-thru safari and speaking of the nuclear power plant, there are signs all over the trail that says if you hear the emergency sirens go off to turn your radio to a particular radio station for information due to a “nuclear emergency”. If I hear the sirens go off you can come dig your animals out of the grill of my car in my driveway. My car would look like a hillbilly’s truck on the first day of hunting season with no limit.

There is a small gift shop kind of thing at the start of the trail where you buy tickets and they have some snacks and souvenirs and whatnot there. In case you aren’t sure, it is like every other place where you take it right up the ass on souvenirs for the kids. And about halfway through the trail there are bathrooms, a restaurant, souvenir shop and a petting zoo. Just a word to the wise, pack a cooler! $30 freaking bucks for a few sandwiches. But there is no other option and trust me, when it’s 100+ degrees outside and you got some hungry kids in the car with another hour of slow moving traffic, you will shell out the 6 sawbucks too!

Oh, one other thing, at the place where you buy your tickets you can purchase a bag of food to feed the animals. But there is a catch, you can only feed certain animals and they have a flyer of the animals that they don’t want you to feed at all. Thing is, damn near every animal but the giraffe and the zebra look just like this damn animal. I didn’t know what to or not to feed. Oh, speaking of giraffes and zebras keep this straight, you can hand feed the giraffes but do NOT feed the zebras by hand. It kind of freaks out the kids if you call a zebra a mo-fo and punch it like that scene from “Conan the Barbarian” where he punches the camel and knocks it out.

Of course we got a bag of food for the critters. But they have some rule where you can only buy one bag of food per car per day or something like that. And yeah, we almost ended up with an entry for “America’s Funniest Home Videos”. I was tossing some critter chow on the ground near our car to get some sort of horned thing to get it close enough so that I could get some decent pictures of it when I guess it noticed the bag of food and thought to hell with these few pieces on the ground I will just eat straight out of the of bag. So he stuck his head in the car and I was feverishly trying to roll up the wrong window. Yeah, it sounded like a girl screamed…

This place also offers guided photo safaris, which I thought I saw but it just turned out to be some dumbasses standing up in the back of a truck. You see this place has some seriously steep hills and what goes up must come down. And it looked to me like it was at the same angle. Yep, they almost got dumped out of the bed of the truck. And I saw where they have night tours so that you can see the nocturnal creatures at play.

This place would be fun as hell if you got together with a bunch of your friends and were hammered. Well, with a sober driver of course. Oh and not in my car! I guess that’s why they kept telling everyone to make sure to stay in your car. Let me explain something to the workers there, the last thing my ass wants to do is to get gored by some animal when it’s 109 degrees outside and lay on the smoldering concrete bleeding and burning until the medics get there. I got no interest in being a human hibachi.

Someone told me that they actually had a safari like in Africa, where you hunt the animals. That’s kind of messed up isn’t it? These animals are confined to a small area by a chain link fence. Isn’t that like going fishing at SeaWorld?

Don’t get dead