Welcome to Alpine Helen!

Sorry, it's been a long time since my last entry. I'm going to try to do one blog entry per week from now on. I'm also going to be doing one vlog per week on youtube. You can watch them on my second youtube channel: www.youtube.com/catgrltv, but they'll both be about the same things probably. So, I've been meaning to write an entry about my vacation for the 4th of July and I haven't gotten around to it until now.
My mom, my stepdad, & I went to Helen, GA and camped at Unicoi State Park. It was awesome! My parents want to live there now. I wouldn't mind living there. It has a great climate. There's no big grocery stores or places like Walmart there. Every building in the city is built to look like buildings from a town that you would find in the European Alps (even Wendy's!). There's lots of little stores to check out (including a glass blowing shop) & little attractions. There's a haunted house, an auto museum, a model railroad, etc. The only one we went to was the model railroad. It was awesome! My mom makes dollhouse miniatures (I'm trying to do it too but I'm not patient enough to make really tiny things, lol) so she thought it was really cool to see it. The model was of Germany from the North Sea to the Alps. There was a circus, a winefest, a crash on the Autobahn, Oktoberfest, a UFO crash, some houses on fire, & a bungee jumper (that really moved!) among lots of other things. They even have some hot air balloons that fly over the model and there are cable cars up in the mountains. Some of the areas (the sea, the train station, Oktoberfest) even have sounds of boats, announcements, or people screaming on rides. I took about 70 pictures of the model & put them on Facebook. I think I might put them on Photobucket so more people can look at them. We also went to a place that has a bunch of tarantulas & lizards. The lizards were pretty cool, but the spiders really creeped me out. They also had a huge albino python.
The greatest thing about Helen is the tubing! If you ever go there, then you have to do this, it's a blast! The Chattahoochee River flows right through Helen and you can get on an inner tube float down the river. I think there are 3 companies that you can rent the tubes from. You park at the starting point, get on the tube, float down the river & go through town, & then you get on a bus that takes you back to your car. You have a choice of going on a 1 or 2 hour float. They also have waterparks that you can go in (though they cost extra). My stepdad decided that we needed to bring some sticks with us in case we got stuck on rocks so he found some tree limbs for us to use (you can also buy a stick from the company). All along the river, they are people who set up picnics & barbeques so they can watch all the people float by on their tubes. I got stuck on a rock right in front of one of the barbeques & ended up flipping over. The current was pushing me down & I couldn't breath for a little bit, but my stepdad hurried over & pulled me out of the water. I was hoping that I wouldn't get wet, lol. As you float through the city, there are some restaurants right on the side of the river where everyone stands there & watches you. One restaurant even had people on microphones narrating what was happening to people. At one point my stepdad got stuck on a rock & they were all betting on whether he'd flip over or not. It was hilarious. When we got to the end, my stepdad decided that he was hungry & we went to a Mexican restaurant. After we were done eating, we decided to go tubing down the river again. It was fun, but not as fun as the 1st time. There were more rude people & there were tons of huge families that had all their tubes tied together so you couldn't get around them. We put sunscreen on out faces & arms before we went tubing, but forgot our legs. My sunburn has been peeling for about a week now. It's really annoying. I also got a couple bruises & a huge, nasty scrape on my legs from falling on the rocks. I don't even remember when I got the scrape. We were so tired from tubing that we didn't even bother going to see the fireworks.
When my parents made the reservations for our campsite, they chose one in the "Squirrel's Nest." It's 16 wooden platforms that are built on a hillside. It was a nice place to camp, but we didn't know that it was a walk-in campsite until we got there. There was a huge group of cubscouts that took up half the platforms & they were really noisy (they had a huge jedi vs sith battle with glow stick light sabers), but it was a fun place to camp.
My mom just told me that they just made reservations again & we're going back to Helen for Labor Day. I'm sure that it will be fun! I want to go to the auto museum & the haunted house this time. Well, I need to go to bed. Talk to everyone later!

Zoo Tycoon 2

I haven't written a blog entry in a while, so I decided to write about one of my favorite games, Zoo Tycoon 2. One of my friends from high school has the original Zoo Tycoon and it sounded like fun so I bought Zoo Tycoon 2 as soon as it came out. Like other Tycoon games, the goal of Zoo Tycoon is to build and maintain a business which is, in this case, a zoo. You can play with unlimited funds, or challenge yourself with running the zoo on a limited amount of money (you set the amount yourself) and completing challenges to earn extra money. There are also campaign zoos that start you off with limited money (you can't set the amount) and have a main goal that you must complete before moving on to the next zoo. There are many different sets of campaign games that have about 3 zoos in each. When all the zoos are completed, you unlock a new item to use in your zoo.
In the game, you build exhibits for your animals and there are many different types of fences, food, toys, trees, rocks, etc available depending on what animal is going to be put in. You also have to build food courts, statues, playgrounds, etc to keep your guests happy. You can hire zoo keepers and maintenance workers to help you or you can do everything yourself in Zoo Keeper mode. In this mode, you can sweep up an animal's poo, fill their food and water dishes, bathe them, and kick their toys, as well as empty trash cans and recycling bins. Based on how well you take care of your animals and guests, how many animals you have, and the diversity of species in your zoo, you get a rating of 1/2 a star up to 5 stars. When you're not playing with unlimited money (all objects are available in this mode), many objects and animals aren't available for you to use until you reach a certain number of stars.
There are also 4 expansion packs for Zoo Tycoon 2. I have the first 3 expansion packs, Endangered Species, African Adventure, and Marine Mania. Each of these expansion packs comes with more animals, more themes for buildings, and more challenges and campaigns. I've heard mixed reviews about the fourth expansion pack, Extinct Animals, so I haven't bought it. I love this game and I'll play it for hours when I'm really bored. I love to come up with new designs and take pictures of them to show people. Recently, I decided to take videos of my zoos and post them on Youtube. I don't have a lot of good zoos right now because I lost all of the ones I used to have. There was a virus on my computer and the only way to get rid of it was to wipe my computer clean, so I lost a lot of files. So, I've started to rebuild my zoos and unlock all the objects again. Here's some videos of two zoos that I recently built:






Feel free to go on Youtube and leave comments on my video. If you don't have a Youtube account, then you can just leave a comment here. Thanks!

Hello!

Hello everyone! I've wanted to have a blog for awhile, so I decided to come on here and create one. I'm not really sure what to write about so my posts will probably be really random. I think for this first post I'll write about something that I found today. My #1 spot for favorite insect is a tie between inchworms and woollybears. Today I found a picture on MSN's Animal Tracks slideshow that made me add a 3rd name to that #1 spot. The picture is of a Cockchafer. It's a type of European beetle that almost went extinct in the 1900s due to pesticide use. People have changed the way they control pests, so the beetles' populations have slowly been growing since the 1980s. They grow to be about 25-30 mm long and have little "leaves" on their antennae. Males have 7 "leaves" and females have 6. The adult beetles eat oak leaves or pine needles and the larvae eat plant roots. The females lay their eggs under the ground and the eggs hatch after 4-6 weeks. The grubs stay under ground for as long as 5 years until they enter a pupation stage (like caterpillars making cocoons). The grubs stay in this stage for 6 weeks and develop into adults. Then, they spend the winter underground and come out in the spring. Once they come out, they only have about 5-7 weeks to live. I'm glad these beetles didn't go extinct. If they had, I probably would have never known that they existed. I think they're kind of cute. :)