Last weekend my husband and I traveled to Glen Rose, TX to visit relatives.  Glen Rose is a small tourist town about 50 miles southwest of Ft. Worth https://www.bing.com/travelguide?q=Glen+Rose&l2sid=f8a986bb-6c73-a854-115e-8a1184e77829&form=PLACAB .  His cousin has lived there all his life. Glen Rose has museums, fossilized dinosaur footprints, river floating adventures, and a small-town atmosphere.

But in all the time we’ve traveled to this small city and visited with cousins, we’d never been to Fossil Rim Wildlife Center https://fossilrim.org/ .   We were amazed.  They are an international wildlife center with breeding programs for endangered species. And I’ve never met a more hospitable staff to both humans and animals.

The area around Glen Rose, on the Brazos and Paluxy rivers, is hilly and lush.  Some of the animals roam around and you can feed them, others are inside pens for their safety and yours.  I made friends with a giraffe who kissed me on the head.  Or she was trying to get my attention to feed her more. I’m going with the kiss option.  Of course, we missed that photo op. 

The day we were there they were preparing to transport a rhino to a zoo in New York.  They have small Mexican Wolves and the larger Gray Wolves as part of their endangered species program.  But I was most impressed with the cheetah exhibit.  Part of their breeding program centers around an area known as “lovers lane” where the cheetahs are allowed to get to know each other and if they show signs of liking each other then they are placed together with the hopes of having offspring.  Everything I saw with the staff showed their great love of animals and they worked hard for the benefit of the animal.

There were antelope that were being bred and reintroduced into the wild in Chad, Africa where they are dying out.  Once again they may roam their native land because of Fossil Rim’s breeding program.

I want to go back and visit Fossil Rim again.  I was so impressed with the staff and animals and I hope they continue to be wild and free on the acres of west Texas and then some day back on their own turf.

What did you do this week?