Belle Isle

Although Daniel had dug into finishing off our room the previous weekend, I decided we needed to play this weekend to give him a break for Father's Day. We decided to go explore Belle Isle, an island that is part of Detroit, right in the middle of the Detroit River between Michigan and Canada. The whole island is a park. It was actually designed by the same man that designed Central Park, so it has a lot of neat things. Well, it has some neat things and a lot of things that you could tell were really cool a long time ago. Unfortunately, it has not been kept up as well as it should have, but we still had a fabulous time. We headed to the Nature Zoo first.They had native turtles, snakes, frogs, and salamanders and a lot of fun educational activities for the kids. The girls really enjoyed watching the beehive and learning about the types of bees. We timed it just right to be able to feed the fallow deer also.




They are actually native to Eastern Europe but back 100 years ago or so they were transplanted over as part of the fad of that time to fill parks with elegant creatures. Just in the 90's it was decided to capture them all and put them in enclosures. The girls had a great time feeding them and getting up close to them. We had lunch across the street by a lake and then went back to the nature zoo for a great presentation on bats. They didn't have any live ones but we sure learned a lot and got instructions for making a bat house (that Nora really wants to make).
Then we hurried over to the boat museum and by the time we figured out how to get there with all the one-way traffic going around the island we only had 10 minutes. Good thing it was a small museum, we actually pretty much saw everything in that 10 minutes.The girls like playing captain in the part of the museum that was actually part of a boat and stuck out over the water looking towards Canada.

Then it was across the street to the Conservatory. I was kind of amazed at the cool stuff they had growing in there and how large it was. They had a giant palm growing right up the center that had to be like 100 years old. In the tropical garden, they had oranges and bananas on the trees and an amazing orchid garden.
The desert/cactus garden room was really cool. The girls knew right away they didn't want to touch anything in there. There was this really interesting century plant that had shot up a bloom stalk, when it had hit the top of the ceiling it broke off, held on by a thread, and then started growing some more. It continued growing and broke through the glass and into the open sky.
They had a neat fountain and some pretty gardens outside the Conservatory.
After playing around there for a bit we finally gave in to the girls pleas and went over to the playscape. They had fun, but they looked quite out of place with their light skin and light hair in a sea of brown skin. We didn't have time to check out the giant slide, beach, water slide, or marble fountain; but we will have to plan another trip to see all that too. We had to head home to drop off the kids to get babysat by the Ruesch's while we went out. We went to shopping for crown moulding and a fan and then went out to dinner. It was a fun memorable day.