View Summer ’09 Part IIb in a larger map
Previously: Ashland to Carlsbad by way of Fresno. Mostly a lot of driving.
Having grown up with frequent visits to her family in this part of the country, Prairie had a few things that she knew she wanted to introduce me to while we were down here. First thing on the list, for our first full day, was the San Diego Zoo. We got up nice and early, borrowed her grandpa’s little Garmin GPS navigator (which was usually handy, occasionally frustrating, and often amusingly bad at pronouncing the Spanish streetnames of southern California), and found our way down to the zoo.
Prairie had told me a lot about how good the San Diego Zoo was — how big, how well-renowned, how many animals, and so on — and for the most part, I do have to agree…that’s a really impressive zoo! My only complaint was simply that we each have our favorite animals, and while Prairie was treated to not just one, but two kinds of hippos (regular and pygmy, which she’s sure is small enough to live quite happily in her bathtub, and expects hers to be delivered any day now)…well, there’s a sad and disturbing lack of penguins at this zoo! Harrumpf. Quite disappointing, I tell you.
(Well, okay…maybe not that disappointing, since there is this place called Sea World not terribly far away, which we just may have visited the next day, and which possibly has an extremely good penguin display. Perhaps. But. Still. No penguins.)
Lack of penguins aside, though, that’s quite a zoo. We spent the entire morning and a good chunk of the afternoon wandering around, starting with the hippos (for Prairie), finding the bonobos for Shelly, and then just striking out randomly to see what we could see. One of the nice things about getting there right when the doors opened was that many of the animals are more active in the cool of the morning, so we were able to see things like the grizzly bears playing in their pool and two of the zoo’s pandas exploring their area. Some of my favorite photos ended up being of the meerkats (which are just too cute not to be perfect subjects) and the silvered leaf-langurs.
All in all, quite a fun day! Here’s a slideshow of just the shots from the zoo, in semi-random order (actually ordered by whatever Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ algorithm chooses), or here’s a link to just the zoo photos. Of course, you can always look at the full set of vacation photos, too!
Next: A quiet evening visit.