Butterflies Everywhere

This is a picture heavy post because I'm out of town visiting my mom so I don't have a lot of blogging time this week. Last weekend my husband and I visited the Fourth Annual Butterfly Bash at the Durham Museum of Life and Science.

One of the museum's exhibits is the Magic Wings Butterfly House. It is a beautiful conservatory that is kept at 80 degrees F year round. It is filled with tropical plants and hundreds of beautiful butterflies from different locations around the world.

The butterflies just fly around everywhere and if you are lucky, they will land right in your hand. It is really quite a beautiful thing to see. On Saturday and Sunday they release new butterflies into the conservatory. We didn't see that this time.

There are benches to sit on in and little feeding stations set up through the exhibit. So there are plenty of opportunities to get close to the butterflies.

The tricky part was as soon as we went inside, the humidity cause my camera lens to fog over. I'll have to prepare myself for that better next time. I wasn't really pleased with the photos I got. This time it was an issue of skill of the photographer because plenty of opportunity existed. I'm definitely going to have to try this again.

The museum had some interesting exhibits inside as well as a nice playground area for kids. They had some black bears, red wolves, and lemurs in an outside exhibit too. There is a wetland exhibit and they are putting in some radio controlled sailboats this spring. My husband wants to go back and try those.

They also have a small area with farm animals. They had a Belted Galloway cow, who doesn't like a striped cow? They had some pygmy goats and of course some sheep. I had to take pictures of the sheep. It was the closest thing we saw to yarn all day long.

It was a nice day, but next time I'll visit on a day without all the hoopla going on around the butterflies. If you go to visit, I'd suggest going early in the morning before a large group gets there. I hope to be able to go again and try for some better pictures of the butterflies.

We are planning a day trip sometime this summer to the local zoo. I thought it would be fun to try and get some pictures of all the animals. But it did take a little work to convince my husband to go along. He just really doesn't like to see animals taken from their natural habitats and caged in somewhere. but I'm optimistic it will be a fun trip.

One of my goals this year is to visit more local attractions, like museums, you know - soak up the local culture. Hopefully I'll find some good things to share here along with my knitting.