San Diego Zoo

Sat Oct 2

To start the day, Dave and I took a quick ride down to the enormous Factory Outlet mall, located right on the north edge of the Mexican Border.  Meg and Jaime had spent 4 hours there yesterday, finding many deals.  Dave and I were satisfied with socks and T-shirts!!!  The place was so enormous, with so many stores, it would take a day and a half just to hit each store and scout it out.

At 11:00 we headed out for the zoo.  Because Dave’s truck was one seat short of holding all 5 of us, I decided to take the scooter and follow Dave.  Things went well for about one minute, until Dave decided to take the Interstate 5 short-cut to the zoo.  My scooter is not legal on the I-5 (it only goes 45 miles per hour) so I had to bale out, but he was already committed to entering the freeway. 

Luckily I had taken the GPS and stopped to program in the zoo as a location.  However, the GPS also wanted to take me on I-5.  I new the general direction fortunately, and after “fighting” with the girl inside the GPS on numerous occasions, I made my was to the zoo on back roads.  It was a very interesting ride as I was taken through the old residential areas of San Diego.  I wish that I had more time as there were numerous little spots that I would have investigated, also, I have never seen so many garage sales (every second block!!) in my life.  The way some were set up, I think they may run them every weekend!

Meanwhile poor Dave did not know what was happening, so they headed back looking for me.  Finally they gave up and headed for the zoo and had just got in the gate when I arrived to meet them!

The zoo was crowded, but not overly so.  We had seen it before, but were looking forward to seeing it with the kids.  For the past nearly 100 years, it has been a landmark in the city of San Diego—a must see for tourists.  It is an amazing Zoo, and when you think that it has an operating budget that exceeds $300,000,000 annually, there is a lot to see!  Quite a bit of their money goes to protecting endangered spieces through breeding programs, and protecting habitat in areas where the species reside.

Finley seemed to enjoy herself most of the time, which made it much more relaxing for Dave and Meg.

Jaime also had a great time as the two of us raced from exhibit to exhibit while the other circulated in a more relaxed manner.  She also enjoyed playing “Auntie” a lot of the time…

Ade had a great time with the girls, and also in playing Grandma to Finley throughout the day,  however, I guess I did give her a bit of a worry when I went AWOL at the beginning of the day.

My absolute favorite is the gorilla exhibit.  I could spend hours there, and when you consider that I have bee to the place 3 times, I probably have.  The write up by the exhibit says that they are 97% the same as human beings, and when you study their interactions and activities, it is hard to dispute this fact.

This old “Sliver-back” definitely ruled the roost, however he was regularly “tested” by one of the other relatively mature males in the group of about 6 or 7 gorillas.

A couple of times in the past, I had seen the Panadas, but the hour long line-up on this occasion was just a little too much, if we wanted to take in as much of the zoo as we could.

Dave and Meg decided to call it an early night, not only because of Finley, but they had scored a couple of tickets to the San Diego Chargers (NFL) game tomorrow.  I guess we are “dog sitting” Murphy (Meg and Daves bantam bulldog).  I would have loved to go to the game, but new that I would never get tickets anywhere near where they were sitting.