Your mission, if you choose to accept….

Lee led me on a surprise Anniversary mission this past weekend. I had no idea what we were doing until I read each card that gave me each step in the mission. First, we drove up to his mom’s house to drop of Lexie. Then, we headed to Long Beach, where we walked around The Pike and the shops along the harbor.

Lee tried chocolate covered bacon from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

Long Beach Harbor

My next mission card led us to The Varden, a boutique hotel right there in Long Beach. After checking in and resting (and enjoying some cable, which is a luxury we don’t have at home), it was time for me to look at the next card. It led us first to a wine tasting in the hotel lobby, then down to P.F. Changs for dinner! After dinner, on the way back to our hotel, we walked by a Johnny Rockets, which is the restaurant we first got to know each other at. Of course we had to stop to have a milkshake.

The next day was the big surprise. I looked at my mission card, which told me to plug in an address into our gps. The name of the city was Acton, which I had never heard of! I was baffled - I had no idea where we were going. We drove out toward Lancaster, into the mountains in the middle of nowhere. We came upon a sign that said “Shambala”. As we pulled into the dirt parking lot, I realized that we were going to take a tour of an animal sanctuary! This particular sanctuary is for big cats that have been found in people’s closets, at roadside zoos, or given up by people who thought they could keep one as a pet but realized it was too much to handle.
Before we went in, I opened my present - a hiking pack!

At the Shambala, they have 63 big cats, including two of Michael Jackson’s tigers. We got a two hour tour, learning a lot about the animals and where they came from. Some of the stories were pretty sad, but it was great to see that now they have a place to live humanely.

The Shambala was started by Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marne. She came up with the idea for it when she was filming the movie Roar. We were able to get really close to the cats, and one of the highlights for me was hearing the lions roar.

The even have a liger!

Ligers do not occur naturally because there is only one place in the world where lions and tigers could possibly cross paths. So, this liger was a product of the mating of a male lion and a female tiger probably for a private buyer. Ligers are bigger than lions and tigers, but their organs are proportionally small for their bodies. They usually have a shorter life span than lions or tigers. A cat with a tiger for a mother and lion for a father is called a tigon.

Going to the Shambala was a great surprise! The whole mission of the Shambala was to make sure these big cats have a good life and also to get the word out that trying to own a big cat is a bad idea. They should be left in the wild, not only for their own sakes, but ours as well.

Eating a picnic lunch at the Shambala.