Apenheul

We had some decent weather on Saturday and nothing to do, so we decided to take a drive to Apeldoorn (about an hour away) and visit a local monkey park. Apenheul Primate Park turned out to be a lot of fun. I was thinking we would last 2-3 hours max, but we ended up spending a good 5 hours exploring the park. It's basically set up like a zoo with it's main attraction being primates. There was a petting zoo with various animals and there was an aviary as well. But we were there to see the primates. And we definitely saw all kinds of primates! The larger primates were of course behind glass or gates, but most of the small monkeys were free range. Our first stop was to see some squirrel monkeys. There were nets and ladders above our heads for the monkeys to move around on. They of course jumped from tree to tree and were all over the place. We saw lots of baby squirrel monkeys hanging on to their mommy's backs.

After the squirrel monkeys we went in search of some lunch and came across some very friendly Golden-headed Lion Tamarins. For some reason the park was really quiet in that particular section so the tamarins didn't have any fear making friends with us, especially Audrey.

At one point there were 3 tamarins on the stroller tray, but I didn't get a picture of that. After some lunch and some play time at a fun playground, Audrey took a little nap in the stroller while we continued to explore the park.

We checked out the gorillas, the barbary macaques, and the orangutans. With the help of her daddy, Rachel decided to see what it was like to be a monkey. All throughout the day they had feeding schedules of different primates. We made it to one feeding, the feeding of the gorillas. It was somewhat interesting (probably would have been more interesting if we understood Dutch a bit better). But we enjoyed a little bit of a break from walking and watching the gorillas fight over their food. We caught the tail end of a presentation in the "Madagascar" area. There was this cute little family of lemurs:
They look pretty harmless, don't they? Which they are, but one still gave me a scare. I was standing there watching this cute little family and all of a sudden the mama or the papa (I don't know which) decided to jump on top of the little fence right in front of me. I didn't realize the goal was the fence, I thought the goal was me, so I flinched a bit. But hey, everyone around me good a good chuckle! Below you'll see a picture of some type of monkey (not sure what type because they just wandered throughout the park and we never saw their official exhibit) that was kind of freaky. They were very brave and very loud. There were 3 of them wandering the park together. They'd just walk right along with everybody else.

After we were monkeyed out the girls enjoyed a few rides on the carousel. It was Audrey's first carousel ride and she enjoyed it.

As we were leaving Apenheul you had to walk through a park area to get back to the car. We decided to plop the girls down and try to get some pictures. So much fun trying to get them to look at the camera and smile at the same time. Oh well, they're still pretty cute. :) Looking at me (Andy was taking the pictures):

Rachel actually looking at the camera and smiling:
Audrey actually looking at the camera and kind of smiling:

We definitely had fun checking out all the different types of monkeys. Rachel would get so excited every time she spotted a monkey. She really got into. :) She keeps on talking about going back to the "monkey park".