Vacation Day 1 - San Diego Zoo

Last week was our long awaited vacation to San Diego.  We hit it off by going to the Zoo.  The kids were super excited we finally made it!

I loved that it not only had real animals but even the bushes were animals.  Reminded me a bit of Disneyland.

As soon as we got in and they handed Chase his own map, we instantly had our own guide who showed us which way to go the entire day.  Gotta say he was pretty good at map reading.  We later got him a zookeeper hat to be an official zoo guide.  Our darn guide kept loosing his map though and we were lost.  This is a huge zoo!

We saw lots of neat animals some up close.  The Leopard:

The orangutans were really funny to watch,

We did see the elephants getting a check-up that was pretty neat to watch.  The kids loved climbing all over the statues throughout the park.

We got to see the polar bears having a snack of carrots.

Sadi even danced with one!

We waited in a ridiculously long line to see the Panda Bears.  Not really sure why there was a line, it was kinda anti-climatic.   They were pretty far away and hard to see.

We had a hard time finding the Gorillas, but boy were they fun to watch. 

I think Sadi fell in love with this one.

Chase was almost lunch for one saber tooth...whew, good thing they're extinct!..I meant that he's not they're lunch, not that they're extinct.

Some definite highlights of the zoo:  (1)We got to see this cute little giraffe that was only one week old.

(2) The two baby jaguars were out on exhibit (these were Chase's favorite, and we had to pry him away from them)

(3) We got to see an extreme Rhino fight.  These two ran around and butted each other until they were both bleeding pretty bad.  Pretty cool to watch. 

At the end of the day we even got to take one of the animals home with us!  A new baby jaguar (shut up, I know this is a tiger, but Chase is adamant it is a baby jaguar).  He named him  stripes, go figure.

That night we took the kids to Old Town and walked around and had dinner.

We went to the famous?  Casa de Reyes.  Matt had been talking about this a lot before our trip and was really excited to take us here.

I have to say it didn't live up to all that people said about it.  The service was terrible and the food was only so-so.  But, the company was amazing!

A great start to a great vacation!