My visit to Safari Ltd!

Hello, everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend. Mine was crazy fun, what with Paint Your Heart Out in Friday, seeing How to Train Your Dragon on Saturday (AWESOME movie, by the way!!) and then the Palm Beach Zoo on Sunday. Whew!

But that's not all --and this is going to be a photo-heavy post so I apologize in advance! (and just so you know, you can click on each individual photo to be taken to its Flickr page for more info.)

On April 1st I had the incredible, amazing, unbelievable luck of being invited quite suddenly to visit the Safari Ltd company. Safari Ltd manufactures some of the best animal replicas in the market --detailed, durable, with great attention to realism and lots of personality. I've always been an avid collector, lately adding new replicas to my collection on a more or less weekly basis. I also have a Squidoo lens and Flickr group dedicated to this hobby, so when company president Ramona Pariente kindly invited me to come visit on Monday, I was absolutely over the moon!

Here I am at the front desk. Below is what was the best part of the entire tour: the conference room! I had never seen so many animal replicas in one place; in fact, many I did not even know existed! I was left to my own devices in there for a good while and went all around the room, staring at everything open-mouthed for SO many times. They were all so beautiful!

I was even allowed to choose a whole bunch of replicas for myself. I didn't get to take them home yesterday (I'm sure that if they let every visitor raid their conference room displays it would be quite an annoyance to replace them, ha ha!) but they have my address, so I suppose they'll show up at my doorstep one of these days. I can't wait!! ♥

    

    

Vice-president of sales Alexandre Pariente took time out of his very busy schedule to give me a full tour of the premises (thanks again, Alex!) It was a wonderful experience. The warehouse was a fascinating place! I really wish I had taken more photos, but I guess I was just too distracted by everything around me... Anyway, at least I got a few! Below you can see quality control...

The first photo below shows the room where the posters and printed and laminated, and the second one is one of the dioramas Safari Ltd uses to display their replicas at toy trade shows:

    

Finally, here are a couple more shots of the warehouse:

    

This was truly a wonderful experience, though I'll admit to feeling just a little bit guilty that I got to go while so many other Safari Ltd enthusiasts that would love to visit don't get the chance. I hope that you enjoy looking at these photos and getting a glimpse of where all the magic takes place. =]

-Marina