It rained, it poured, the sun came out.
We arrived just before 11am in the midst of a torrential downpour. When I say downpour, I mean POUR! There was thunder and lighting and rain, rain, rain. We ended up staying in the van for nearly another 1/2 hour waiting it out, then grabbed the umbrellas, one munchkin each and headed into the zoo.
Joseph decided it would be more fun WITHOUT an umbrella, so he puddle jumped and essentially got soaking wet. We left the stroller, cooler and camera in the van since we figured we were going to be heading back out (or so I thought) without accomplishing much. Got into the zoo and couldn’t find the meeting place right away. Did eventually, but it wasn’t covered. so that was out.
Met up with Tara and Leslie’s families and stayed under the shelter of a porch for another 1/2 hour while it continued to POUR! We were laughing at the irony. Three months of planning down the tubes! There were supposed to be 8-12 families with twins from across North Carolina. We called it a rain or shine event and boy was it raining!
By 12 (ish), we decided to go to the little “restaurant” on the other side of the courtyard and managed to walk over and not get too wet. Wiped off a few tables and setup for some lunch — minus the good stuff in the coolers of the cars. D’oh! Between the 5 adults, there were 7 kids, so we huddled around some tables with chips, zucchini bread (yum!), cheese puffs, and some zoo food of popcorn chicken and fries.
By 12:30 (ish) the sun was out! I ran to the car to get the stroller and camera (since we’d left them). As a group, we took a bunch of photos and then headed our separate ways to enjoy the zoo for another few hours.
As a group picnic, it was a bust because only 3 sets of TS families made it, but that was still a lot of fun! Hopefully next year, rain or shine will really mean rain or shine and we’ll have a bigger rainy group… or lots of sunshine! 🙂