CA Trip - Day 2 - San Diego Zoo

So on the second day of our trip, we went to the San Diego Zoo. Beautiful place. Zoos are some of Dean and my favorite places to go. San Diego Zoo is really big, but maybe not as big as Omaha Zoo (not sure).

My favorites are always the bears -- brown bears, polar bears, grizzly bears, any kind of bears. Dean's favorites are usually the monkeys. Well we saw plenty of monkeys. Only a couple of brown and grizzly bears. But the polar bears were great. There were 2 in their exhibit and they were actively playing at dunking each other in the water. They were obviously having a lot of fun. And they were HUGE!

There was an awesome panda exhibit. Dean and I discussed how at the Washington D.C. zoo, the big draw there is the pandas. But they have a really crappy exhibit (indoor, with hardly any "natural" looking stuff), and when we went, the pandas were so still that I initially blew by them thinking that they were diaramas.

Not so at the San Diego Zoo. They have 3 pandas: dad, mom, and baby. Dad was asleep, but mom and baby were playing around with each other and having a great time. They were in a really great outdoor exhibit that was very natural looking and gave them plenty of stuff to interact with. When we got there, the zookeeper had just put some honey on a log, and baby was licking off the honey. I guess that's her snack. While we were there, they had a zookeeper there giving us a running commentary that was interesting, and not too intrusive.

We also saw more birds in this zoo than anywhere else. They have like 4 aviaries, and even in places where they don't have an aviary, they have birds.


The weather, again, was perfect. Which reminds me -- San Diego Zoo is really well shaded. There are trees everywhere, and wherever there isn't shade trees, they have an awning to provide some shade. And there's plenty of places to sit down and rest too. I also appreciated the escalators and the special "less steep" path that they put on the map.

We also rode the tram all the way around the zoo. Some of the large outdoor animals I don't really get into, but it was nice to drive by them.

Towards the end of the day, there was a live sea-lion show that was a lot of fun. Dean says that he liked it better than the Shamu show at Sea World. I don't think it was THAT good, but it was still nice. I'll have some video clips up later on in the day for that.


So we spent all day at the zoo, and then went back home to Howard's for dinner. Howard tried to get dinner on the table earlier this time, but it was still 8:30 before we ate (at least we got to have a snack!). He made a yummy, savory roast beef. I can't even remember what he served with it. But I do remember stuffing my face again. And going to bed stuffed. Ugh.

You can see all the pictures for Day 2 here.