Steve Irwin Day

Today we celebrated 'Steve Irwin Day'. It has been just over a year now since Steve Irwin passed away. They chose to make November 15 the State of Queenslands 'Steve Irwin Day', as this was the day (two years ago) that Harriet the Sea Turtle passed away. Harriet was an Australian Zoo icon. She was over 150 years old and Steve's favourite animal in the zoo.

We got up early, dressed in Khaki and headed to the Zoo to celebrate Steve Irwin Day. It was packed, there were thousands of people there, but we are glad that we went. I have always liked Steve Irwin, I thought that he was a little extreme and yes a little crazy, but he had such an infectious personality. His research and documentaries are invaluable and he has made so many of us more aware of nature and of how we need to protect it and conserve it.

A bit of history about the Australian Zoo: it opened in the early 1970s and was a mere 4 acres. It is now 70 acres and over the next five years it will expand to 100 acres with the end goal being close to 500 acres. Oh Crikey, that is a lot!! It just received the award for being Queenslands major tourist attraction for 2007.

Terri Irwin and the kids were present. Terri released and was signing her new book My Steve so people were lined up for hours to get her to sign it.

Terri unvelied this new memorial which is located at the front of the Zoo just past the admissions area. Steve was known for his love of his family, conservation and of course having fun.

The crocoseum (designed by Steve so that people could see how the Crocs really act in the wild) was packed for some pretty neat performances. Bindi Irwin and the Crocmen received awards for their album reaching gold. Bindi was also the youngest Australian to receive an Aria award. She preformed two new releases that were dedicated to her Dad. She is pretty cute and loves the camera and people!

We also heard Olivia Newton John sing three of Terri and Steve's favourites. She does have a beautiful voice.

We did get a chance to check out the Zoo. There were lots of activities that we could have stuck around for, but we did want to see the Zoo. Some favourites were Kangaroo Island. You can get up close and personal with the Kangaroos. Feed them, pet them, talk to them. We got some great video of us petting them (my camera batteries died, but thankfully we had the video camera with us). We also got to pet the Koalas and that was really neat. The snake cave was really neat too. I do not like snakes, but it was really neat to see the different venemous snakes and where they live--yikes! Of course the Crocs were pretty cool too. Terri did a Croc show in the Crocoseum. We got it on video and it is pretty amazing.

I have a lot more pictures to share, but will have to do it on another post. In the end we had one tired little boy, who was so excited to see all of the different kinds of animals. He loves animals, especially dogs, so every animal to him is a papapa--that is how he says puppy!