The Zoo on Ice

Okay, so I bought this membership to the zoo a few months back. They'd discounted them as a sort of remainder of the year deal, and I did the math and if we went about once a month, I'd come out ahead of individual tickets.



I realize that if you weren't going to go once a month to begin with, you're not saving a dime either way, but the pool had closed at an appallingly early date and I needed to line up some alternate family stuff to do. Plus, I'd unforgiveably managed to go several years without taking my kids to the zoo at all, so there was that on top of it all.



They're only closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, so I got to wondering, what do they do all winter? Do elephants play in the snow? Who knows? Maybe kangaroos are better adapted to the cold than you'd expect.



Well, nothing quite like that. The sea lions do really well, like you'd figure. But the whole Africa section is closed for the season. The roos are off display as well as a lot of the other animals.



Quite a few birds were on display, as were Llamas and deer and whatnot. Mo and Em got to feed the deer a few pellets, that was cool.



The Discovery Barn is usually an avoid for us. Mo gets overloaded on the noise almost before the door closes on us in there. It's a big, echoey place full of kids. Except when we got there, there were only two other people in the whole place. There were maybe five families, including us, in the whole zoo as far as I could tell.



We did have a scare in the Discovery Barn. I started talking with the other Dad about cameras, trying to keep an eye on Mo out of the corner of my eye. The other Dad had a very serious camera, something I've been obsessing on in true Lobster fashion. He let me shoot a pic with his camera just to get a feel for the action, the viewfinder, etc. His is a more serious camera than even I fantasize about, but once I zoomed in on a bird and depressed the trigger halfway for focus I was almost started by how fast it popped into focus. Heavy, rather bulky, but now I know what they mean when they talk about shutter lag in a camera like mine.



So I turn around, scan the room for Mo and she's not there. I mean, this was a disappearance in maybe thirty seconds, the time from when he put the strap around my neck to when I realized I'd lost my bead on her in the snap of one picture.



Maybe she'd gone up the stairs to dot he slide again, but nope. I went out the front doors, figured if she went out that way it would be for the playground equipment, but nope. I enlisted the camera guy and another family, 'Kid in a pink coat?'



Then Em heard a bell and figured it out. Mo had found the elevator that runs between the two floors of the barn, presumably for handicap accessability. She was in the elevator and had discovered the alarm button. Yikes.



We went on to the Peekaboo Tree, the playground equipment, etc.



The tigers were out. Sort of. One of them was holed up in a log. He seemed to think we were more interesting than I usually think the tigers think people are, maybe because he'd had more alone time lately.



So then, on a lark, we did the Imax. I wanted to see the deep sea documentary, but I was reading the Monday-Wednesday schedule. Like the chimps, the documentaries were off display. The film showing was Open Season, which is basically Shrek with animals. Instead of an ogre, you have a big, tame bear. Instead of a donkey, an obnoxious deer. Instead of a fairy princess, you've got a park ranger. Etc.



Still, it was very funny and well executed. The huge screen was hard to focus on and when we left I had a headache, but if you're going to bitch about the hangover, you shouldn't go to the party, right?



As we were leaving, a family saw me taking pics of the girls by the paddlefish sculpture, and the mother from that family asked me if I wanted her to take our picture together. She even took a couple of shots to be sure. It was very thoughtful, her just offering like that.