We had a great weekend. As mentioned in the previous post, we went back to Prospect Park on Saturday as planned. We walked for about 5 hours all around the park - it's pretty damn big. I started wondering if it was bigger than Central Park until we looked at a map of NYC in the subway - Central Park is about four times the size of Prospect Park ..wow, that certainly changed my perspective of Central Park, it really is huge.

They have a small zoo in Prospect Park, but I'm close to thinking I liked it more than either the Central Park zoo or the big Bronx Zoo. They have meerkats. They have prairie dogs. If they had weasels and river otters as well then they'd rule, no question about it. IceQueen took a heap of pictures, the meerkats seemed to be posing for her, just hope the pics come out ok. The camera has a tendancy to occasionally focus on things entirely different from what it's being pointed at, so we'll see. The meerkats were indoors which was kind of strange, maybe they can't handle the winters here? It was the prairie dogs that had the outdoor enclosure, complete with little perspex domes you could stick your head into and look at the animals up close ..they have the same thing for the meerkats at the Auckland zoo (New Zealand). Oh, they have kangaroos and wallabees as well! Who would've thunk?

The weather was amazing - hot and sunny with a light breeze so you didn't undergo a complete meltdown. We wandered throughout the park, there's a few ponds, a lake, paved 'bush' trails and stone bridges winding all over the place through the forest - actually it's pretty easy to lose your bearings, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can also go for horse treks through the park, and the lake has boats you can rent out ..and all this time we had absolutely no idea about this place! We were going to continue our walk through the large botannical gardens but decided to save that for next time.

We intended to go to the soundshell to watch another concert after the walk, they had slide guitarist Derek Trucks, the Tony Trischka Band and Scrapomatic playing one after another, but by the time we walked back to the soundshell we were both pretty knackered and decided to head back to the apartment for some salad and fruit (it was that kind of day).

Sunday was lazy day. We sunbathed by the swimming pool for a few hours, having the occassional swim when we felt overheated - yup it was another hot sunny day with the temp above 30°C as usual. Eventually we headed back upstairs to our apartment and reflected on what a good weekend it had been. It was at about this same time that we realized we had both scored a rather good sunburn. Ouch.

Yesterday and today have been a little cooler but incredibly humid with mostly overcast skies and occasional rain and thunder storms ..in fact there's thunder rumbling as I write this. I looked out the window last night (actually about 3.30am this morning) and watched a pretty active lightning storm cutting loose. I really enjoy watching nature flex its muscles.

Almost forgot to mention, on Friday night during the concert there were a couple of bugs flying around fairly close by. As I was watching one of them, it suddenly glowed a bright neon green colour for a few seconds - it was a firefly! We don't have fireflies in NZ that I'm aware of (although we have glowworms.. does that count?) so I was pretty excited to see them up close and personal. Very groovy.

The thunder storm outside has suddenly intensified in a big way so I'm going to check it out for a while. See ya later.