Have you ever been to the wildlife safari in Oregon?
I knew when my birthday came around that we would probably do another trip to Winston Wildlife Safari since Arya didn’t really remember the first trip and Delilah had never been yet. We all love animals, so it seemed like the best choice as a weekend getaway.
I decided to keep it simple and book the last place we stayed at since it was family-friendly and fun, which is surprisingly the Seven Feather’s Casino. They have a big pool, had a decent arcade (we noticed they moved it to where the previous tiny gift shop used to be and now it’s kind of “meh”) and of course, they have restaurants and a spa that I didn’t try out.
We got to borrow a two-tone black and red 2021 Chevy Trailblazer RS for a few days for our trip which made the drive a little more fun and exciting! It had plenty of room for our luggage with a max cargo volume of 54.4 cu ft. and had ample space for our legs and feet. The kids loved the color and being able to use the internet wifi signal while driving 3.5 hours to the casino. Streaming our music from our pandora subscription was also cool since our 2 cars aren’t equipped with such features since they’re a 2005 and 2013. I could tell a difference with the trailblazer vs the normal car I drive since it has a little more oomph to get up and go quickly. It has 3 drive modes; normal, AWD (snow on fwd), and sport. One of these days we’ll be upgrading my husband’s car. Until then, we get to try out cars we wouldn’t normally think to try out.
We arrived at the hotel, checked in, and then decided we should probably eat go eat dinner and decided on Cow Creek Restaurant in the casino, and 5 hours later, I was running to the bathroom from food poisoning. Way to ring in the evening on my birthday! LOL
The next day I was feeling much better, which was great because we had to be at the safari before 10 am to do the cheetah photo experience. Let me just say, it was not worth the price per person but we didn’t really know what it entailed. If we didn’t get a deal on Groupon, I probably would have been upset we spent a huge amount just to have a mediocre photo of a cheetah standing like 20 feet in front of us on 2 leashes staring directly into the sun. They did a lot of talking about facts about cheetahs but my kids were getting bored and wanted to see the animals. They weren’t interested in standing there for 30 min listening to a guy talk. So, if your kids are impatient like mine, I would probably skip this one. We haven’t tried the others, but I imagine it’s more of the same.
The kids loved the safari drive-through and of course, being able to feed the animals. One of the emu’s ended up stealing Delilah’s food cup out of her hand, so now she loathes emus. It traumatized her for a good couple of weeks since she just couldn’t stop talking about the mean emu!
Despite the mean emu and me getting food poisoning, we had a good time and will do it again in another couple of years.