My family and I are newly home from a family vacation in Omaha, thanks to my out-laws wanting to get everyone together for the Fourth of July.
I love the Omaha area so much. The Old Market is full of good food and neat art, like the odd and wonderful Garden of the Zodiac, which I love. It is slowly getting more and more overgrown and wild, and I feel like there is some sort of commentary about our culture’s use of zodiac signs and horoscopes in that.
We also saw some paintings by Bart Vargas, exploring Americanism. It was really great, and I wish I had enough money that I could have bough a few. He is very clever with textures and his titles made already remarkable pieces even better. You can find his website over here.
Omaha also has a world class zoo, and there is an amazing safari park nearby so I got to take a lot of pictures of cute animals.
The Omaha zoo is really amazing (and has Okapi, my favorite animal!). They keep making it better and better. They really understand both what visitors want and that the animals have needs too so they are doing things like building bigger and better habitats for the animals while giving the humans great views and transportation options.
Their train now gives you great views of the animals and the waiting area has great music. Our waiting area was right across from where the ostriches and impalas hang out.
All in all it was an amazing vacation, and I will probably be sorting pictures from it until it is time to go to WorldCon.
