Fun Family Day Trip: Bearizona

I hope everyone had a good long weekend! We are all still at home here as I am still on my FMLA and my husband has gone back to work, but he is still working from home full time. I've been trying to do projects around the house to keep myself busy. I'm trying to still be slow and careful and not exercise too much since I haven't hit six weeks since my C-section yet. It is hard to just be at home all the time. The struggle of COVID was compounded by the heat of the valley, and has now been compounded by a grieving family. We just really needed a nice day that would be a change of pace for us.

So Saturday morning my husband suggested we take a day trip somewhere cooler. Even though Phoenix is called "The Valley of the Sun," there are plenty of much cooler places in Arizona to go to. So we loaded up in the car and drove up north to go to Bearizona!

We hit a lot of heavy traffic (long holiday weekend means everyone wants to get out of the heat). When we finally got up to Bearizona however, we had a lot of fun!

"What is Bearizona?" You ask? Well, it is a wildlife preserve in Williams, Arizona where you can see a lot of great wildlife.
There are two parts to the park. First is the driving section. You stay in your car and drive through the preserve. You can see deer, mountain goats, sheep, wolves, burros, bison, and of course, bears. You can drive through that section of the preserve as many times as you'd like. We went through twice. The animals can get very close to your car! It's pretty cool to see them all. When you drive through the sections with the bears and wolves you have to keep your windows rolled up and the car locked. 

Here is a fun video of some bison crossing the road ahead of us. We all patiently waited for them to move along to the other side.

There is also a part of the preserve where you can walk around and see more animals. We saw porcupine, beavers, baby grizzly bears, foxes, cute little otters, and big beautiful jaguars (and a lot more!) Normally they also have a few cool shows for you to enjoy, but the shows are nixed right now because of COVID. Even without the shows Bearizona was a neat place to enjoy. It got us out of the house, and it was fun to see our daughter so excited by all the different animals. It made my husband's bear jokes almost "bearable" (you see what I did there?)

We like to go on a lot of fun trips in this family. If you go to our travel category you can see other posts we've done on places we've gone either for longer trips, or just short, fun day trips.
What trips have you taken with your family? What do you like to do when you just have a day to get out of your house for a bit? What is your most favorite trip you've ever taken?