Well, it has been a month since I last wrote a post. Mr. Cheap and Great and I've been busy fixing up the house and yard these past few weekends and we've invested in a family membership to the fabulously remodeled Happy Hollow Park and Zoo. Now, when the kids and I come back from a morning adventure jumping on the Frog Hopper, or feeding the goats --the young ones are guaranteed to crash for a few hours. It's like bonus time for the parents! We find free parking on Alma or Phelan and hit the rides for the first hour, rounding it out with a visit to Sam Safari's awesome read-a-loud and the retro puppet show theater. Where, you guessed it --we always brown bag it.
We'll walk through the Japanese Gardens on the way back from our visit to the zoo. Sadly, the gardens lost their beautiful collection of 500 koi fish to a virus brought in by a non-native species fish dumped there a few years ago. They seem to be having trouble containing massive algae in the ponds, but it's still fun for the kids to explore the bridges and pathways. Finally, we stroll through History San Jose and check out whichever museum might be open that day before hitching a ride on the free historic trolley that rolls either inside or outside the park. They have a a lovely bunch of volunteers running the trolley barn.
Yesterday we met the descendants of one of the pioneers of the Portuguese community in San Jose, who exhorted us to come and have a look to their tiny Portuguese Museum. Two twinkly-eyed cousins, proudly showed us pictures of their great grandfather who came from the Azores at age 14 and started his own dairy company. Each individual museum (all historic buildings or homes relocated to the park) is operated by volunteers and open according to special events or their own schedule. The collection includes: printing office, dentist office, firehouse, fruit barn, livery barn, school house, trolley barn, gas station, ice cream parlor, Chinese temple, gift shop and gallery as well as a new Vietnamese museum in the works. History San Jose is always sparsely attended, unless an event is in progress, and makes a lovely place for a post zoo picnic, a safe wide place for scooter practice for the novice rider and in general is just a diamond in the rough in the South Bay. It's definitely a place I would love to volunteer at some point in the future.
