Going to the zoo zoo zoo...

There wasn't much down time this past weekend as @mrsbozz and I headed down to Ohio to celebrate her sisters fiftieth birthday. We had a nice walk and dinner on Friday night that I will write a post about later, but Saturday morning before the real festivities we headed to the Columbus Zoo to take a look at some of the animals with our great/grand niece. She would be our niece's daughter, so however you want to break that down. When our nieces were little kids they used to listen to a singer named Raffi and he has a song called "Going to the Zoo", so that was the inspiration for the title of this post.

The Columbus Zoo is pretty impressive though my brother in law was complaining about how expensive it has gotten over the years compared to when they first moved there. Seems to be the case everywhere huh? Luckily, they buy a season pass, so we were able to get in for free. This wasn't the first time we have been to the zoo, but it is the first time we have been with our grand niece, so that was kind of special. Especially since I can still remember visiting with our nieces.

We stopped for a quick look at the seals before we headed off to the Asia section of the zoo.

We thought it was kind of funny that they have a place called "wild burger" near where all the animals are. You would think they might go for all vegan stuff given the mission of the zoo, but nope. They also had a bunch of other food kiosks open around the zoo including Dip N Dots, which was funny because who gets Dip N Dots at 9 AM in the morning...

Our first stop in "Asia" was the elephants. There was just a single elephant outside eating, but it drew quite a crowd of people.

Inside the enclosure the little elephants were playing with each other. Every now and then the mom elephant would push them apart from each other like "that's enough kids". This zoo is owned and managed by Jack Hannah, so the animals have pretty free range despite them being trapped in a zoo. They can choose to be inside or outside if they want depending on their mood.

From the elephants we moved on to the red panda bears because those are my favorite, but they are usually hiding, so you can't often see them that well. Sure enough, they were tucked away in the tree on this cloudy Saturday morning. If you look really closely, you can see bits of them, but I don't blame you if you can't pick them out.

Especially the one in the top photo.

From the red pandas we moved along to the tigers and we got pretty lucky that after a short wait we were able to watch them feed the tigers some raw meat. It was pretty cute, and the crowd seemed to love it.

We spent some time looking at and learning about the flamingos before we had to decide what our next destination would be.

We picked Australia and the Islands, so we got to spend some time in the aquarium looking at animals from the Great Barrier Reef. The little one is starting to walk now, so we gave her a bit more free reign than we normally would have.

Though she is still a bit slow and unsteady, so eventually she ended up on uncle bozz's shoulders!

She got to see so many cool things at the zoo, including the penguins which were one of her aunts favorites when she was a kid.

It was pretty cool how the rays and the penguins would swim right up against the glass so you could get a good view of them.

Finally, she capped of her trip to the zoo with a ride on the carousel. This carousel was built in something like 1914 and though she seemed a bit unsure at first, by the end she was riding around with her hands up like she was on a roller coaster! It was a great morning spent with our family. We had a really great time and I imagine this will be just one of many future visits the Columbus Zoo with our great niece.

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