I've been remiss in not posting about this sooner. Especially since we have such great photos from this excursion.
I invited my childhood BFF and her two fabulous youngsters to come spend the day in the City, to go visit the San Francisco Zoo. I hadn't been there since I was about 6 years old, to the best of my memory.
Since it was lunchtime and we were all starving, our first stop was the Beach Chalet restaurant. Since they don't often get into the City, we thought it would be cool to have lunch with an Ocean Beach view. I was pleased that I was able to get the little ones to try the hummus.
"What's that," asked Spencer.
"It's dip," I replied.
"What kid of dip?" he asked.
"Bean dip. Garbanzo beans. You'll like it," I assured him.
I should note here we ate every last crostini and polished off the bread plate as well, leaving no speck of hummus uneaten.
After that, we headed to the zoo, and spent the remainder of the day checking out all of the exhibits, which ended up being quite a bit of walking for the kids. Once everyone was tired out, we sought out the only open snack bar (Only 1 snack bar open on a Summer day? Really?) Unfortunately, only 1 open snack bar means one thing: Seagull mayhem.
If multiple snack bars are open, you don't have the entire flock of seagulls (no, not *that* Flock of Seagulls) concentrated in one place, with their beady little eyes trained on your hot dog or churros or ice cream. But I was prepared for those sneaky little bandits, and kept them chased off from the teeny tiny toddler level table we sat at.
I was impressed with the improvements to the living conditions of the animals. On the whole, they had so much more room to spread out and run, play, and enjoy the day's limited sunshine. They don't have the luxury of all of San Diego Zoo's space to spread out, but it is still a major improvement over the concrete enclosures I remembered from my childhood.
The only bummer of the day was most of the big cats were hiding or sleeping. We nearly missed out on the lion that graces this page, as he was lazing about in the far back of the enclosure. But once he decided there was a large enough audience awaiting his presence, he slowly sashayed out towards midfield, and gave us all a good pose.
At closing time, we packed up and took Erika and her family back to BART and vowed to have another outing soon. I think a visit to the California Academy of Science might be a good next visit. I wish they lived closer so these wouldn't de such rare events.
A few favorite photos:
