San Diego Zoo ~ July 31st

This was our third visit to the San Diego Zoo and it was by far the hottest and busiest visit yet. Natalee was being a little ornery, probably our fault from lack of sleep, but nonetheless it really added to the enjoyment of the day, and not really in a good way. The blessing of children, right?

Natalee's #1 request was that she be able to feed the giraffes again. CHECK!

Since it was so busy, I left Nathan and Nat at the Children's area of the zoo and went to stand in the line. I was the first one in line. I've never been first in line for anything. After a while a girl came and sat by me and she seemed totally normal at first, but after talking to her for about 10 minutes she was no longer normal and her stories weren't fun and I came to the realization that I still had to sit by her for 30 minutes. But the payoff was worth it. Nat got to feed her giraffe and that's all that mattered.

We very much enjoyed the bus system and sky ride. I tell you, the San Diego Zoo is not walker friendly. We'd had kind of a debate on wether to do the zoo or the wild animal park, but under the circumstances we were glad we picked the zoo. The WAP is just as hard to walk, but without the great transportation options that gave us the opportunity to be lazy.

The newest portion of the Zoo is called Elephant Odyssey. It was a little more grandiose than I'd expected. It had all these statues of ancient animals that used to live in the California area and their modern day counterparts. The statues were the actual size, so some of them were very large. Natalee wanted her picture by all of them, except for this bird. She didn't want a picture by this bird because it was scary. I told her I'd be in it with her and then she complied.

Lots of other families had the same idea of taking their kids photos on and around these statues. It was by one of them (a gigantic tiger thingy, if I remember correctly) that we had our first of may encounters with a family (who's ethnicity shall not be named, but shall we say a little photo happy) who had four kids. For being as snap happy as the dad was, they were surprisingly bad at posing for photos. In fact, it took them several minutes at each statue to get the kids together, and then to get them to look at the camera, and then to get them to hold still, and then to get them to stop waving their arms....you get the picture. We were apparently on the same schedule as them since we saw them several times. In fact, I'm sorta upset I didn't get a picture of them.

This is the baby panda. Can you see him? The line to see the pandas was so long and as mentioned before, we had kind of an ornery child with us. So we decided to wait until the zoo had cleared a bit before trying to see the little guy. By the time we got to him, his mother had retreated to her quarters for the night and he was asleep in a tree. He's still cute, but we wish we'd have been able to see him awake.

Here are some more things we did that day. About 5 minutes before we left on this trip, Natalee inexplicably got very obsessed with birds. As a result, there are lots of bird photos and very little of anything else.