A trip to Maymont

My friend Rob is fairly new to the area and has two sons. One is Colin's age and one is younger, less than two. He was home today with the boys and Daleen needed a break from mommy duty, so Rob and I hatched a plan to take the boys over to Maymont Park. He had never been before and it's a great place for kids to run around like little crazy people.

Maymont Park is in the city of Richmond, right on the James River. It was originally the estate of James Dooley, who was highly influential in the reconstruction of the South, especially the railroads, after the Civil War. The Maymont estate was donated to the City of Richmond and the park is one of the city's true treasures.

The park consists of tree-covered rolling hills, elaborate gardens, a petting zoo, and animal exhibits ranging from white tailed deer to bears, buffalo, and now even bald eagles. The animals in the park have all been rescued and were unable to be returned to the wild. It was seeing these animals that was the primary focus of our journey today.

Needless to say, the boys had a lot of fun. They ran around and we almost had a hard time keeping up. They started with feeding some goats and sheep at the petting area. Well, since they are still a bit young and were a little scared of being too close to the animals, feeding them initially meant sort of throwing handfuls of these seed grains at the animals. Eventually, after we showed them the goats wouldn't bite their fingers off, they relaxed a little and had their new furry friends eating right out of their hands. The only downside to this whole process is the animal food. Maymont prefers you feed the animals this special animal food that they have in vending machines, which are not unlike gumball machines. You pop in a quarter, turn the handle, and the machine dumps out a large handful. The only problem with this is, the vending machine is kind of away from the actual animals. So there I was, with my bag of quarters, dumping these fine grains of food into my hands, then quickly carrying them to the boys, spilling some along the way, spilling more during the transfer into their tiny hands, only to have them initially throwing the food at the ground in front of goat, but just out of it's reach. (Very frustrating to the goats...) The boys would feed their particular animal and then look to me to run for another load as they found another new sheep which looked hungry. Eventually, I'd had enough exercise so I dumped all the quarters into my pocket and used the bag I had them in to contain a large supply of food. However, when I returned with this bag of animal food, they had pretty much lost interest in feeding and were heading off to the next thing. So after telling Colin not to to throw the food to the animals, I ended up throwing the contents of the baggie over the fence.

The feeding frenzy was followed by checking out some elk. The new eagle and raptor exhibit was excellent and the boys were very impressed by these enormous birds which included several types of hawk and owl and a giant, live, bald eagle.

Following the raptors were the famous Maymont bears. There are two and they put on quite a show today. We watched them play and then go for a swim on their pond. After the bears, we strolled over to the Japanese Garden to feed the ton of enormous Koi that reside in another pond.

The fish feeding was the second main part of our visit. Maymont has an entire pond of these gigantic koi goldfish that will pretty much eat anything. There is a little gazebo-looking hut that sits out over the water and Colin loves to feed the fish from there. Rob was a bit surprised at my preparedness when I produced a bag of quarters at the petting zoo. He was even more surprised when I pulled out an entire bag of stale hamburger buns at the pond. Within fifteen minutes, Colin and his new buddy Luke had the water looking like it was boiling over with all the fish fighting over the scraps of bread.

Colin and Luke ran around some more after feeding the fish and then we headed back to the car. Rob and I both seemed pretty pleased when on the ride home, the children all looked like they had been drugged with Lunesta. "Yesssss", I thought. "They are going to sleep goooood tonight..." Daleen was happy to see us when we got home, and she said she really enjoyed her day off. She needed it and I needed a day to just pal around with Colin. Sometimes I think even Colin needs a little break from Mommy just to change up his routine.

If you live in the Richmond area and you have never been to Maymont, you should go. It really is one of the best things the city has in the way of parks and rec, and it's free, which is in everybody's price range. Besides the animals and large park areas, there is a great visitor center with all sorts of nature exhibits and giant fish tanks showing the various fish that live in different parts of the James River. If you have been to the park, but not recently, you should definitely go again just to see the new eagle/raptor exhibit. Seeing a real bald eagle is something else. Just be sure to bring your walking shoes and plenty of quarters.