Trip To The Zoo

Today we went to the National Zoo. I had made plans earlier in the week to meet Ben and Katylin there. In retrospect I think I planned this one wrong. Getting to the zoo itself is a time consuming effort if you take the metro in (which we did). So after church, lunch and the metro we didn't even get to the zoo until about three thirty. And that only leaves a couple hours. And frankly the zoo is big enough that there's just no way to see everything in a couple hours.




But just because that means there isn't enough time to see everything that didn't stop us from trying. We had both the kids list their two high priority animals to see. Quinn picked the pandas and the monkeys. The pandas were inside. Which means no good pictures since you're shooting through glass and basically in the dark. Mind you that didn't keep just about everyone in there from trying anyway though (myself included).


Catherine picked prairie dogs and a cow. Yes, that's right, of all the animals she could see at the zoo she picked a cow.


The cows are in the newer farm exhibit which is on the far end of the zoo from where we entered, so we never made it there. We tired to tell her she saw a hippo, but even we had trouble with saying that was the same thing as seeing a cow. So we told her at some point we would go by Frying Pan Park and she could see a cow with all the farm animals there.


The elephant area is currently under construction where they're expanding. So there was only one elephant on site that I saw.




The small monkey house was entertaining, but after we got out of that the kids were getting tired. I'm pretty sure that was fallout from going to the Vienna fair yesterday since I know that wore them out.


We did manage to get through the great ape (not to be confused with Grape Ape, a TV show from my childhood) exhibit before the kids were too wiped to continue. Most of the great apes were fairly lethargic and sleeping with only really two or three sitting up.


We had orinally planned on doing dinner, but with the kids as tired as they were and the long trip home ahead of us we had to bail on that since there's no way dinner would have gone well. On the metro trip home we were packed like sardines and had to stand for almost the entire trip back until the last two stops.