The National Zoo – Wachs Across America

The National Zoo was sooooo fun!! Huck needed a work day and he doesn’t love zoos. I don’t blame him. I am a hypocrite because I oppose them on one level, but I LOVE seeing the animals! I do love that zoos can get people excited about animals and nature. You get to learn about the animals and when you see them up close it can really ignite a level of passion you can’t get from a book or computer/TV screen. So really I love sanctuaries that have rescued animals, rather than zoos that breed animals just for captivity. And I definitely prefer zoos that give animals lots of room to roam vs the ones that put them in small cages.

As for the National Zoo, we got a late start, it was quite a drive THRU downtown DC, in the Beast. I was really worried about finding and parking the Beast as everything (even the web site several times) states that the parking is very limited. Whew Parking was no problem at all. We were not sure if we would get rained on, so I warned the kids we would NOT be able to see everything. Except we did come quite close to seeing it all. And if I had been able to navigate the zoo better, we probably COULD have seen it all! Oh man did I mention the kids and I love animals? All animals! We of course knew that the pandas were top priority since we can’t see those in CO and the kids have never seen one in person. (I had seen them in China, but couldn’t wait to see them again!) When we first checked on the pandas the 9month old baby was up in a tree and you could barely see a little bit of cream fur. But the big ones are also so darn cute!! I think we were able to go back to the pandas about 3 times because of the way we saw the zoo. And 3rd times a charm! We saw the cute little guy inside right up close and he was sooooo cute!

We also loved the birds and reptiles, lions, tigers, elephants, and more! The Fennec fox pups were sooo cute and playful and interactive. I loved seeing the kids laughing and playing with them. We loved the bird houses. It was fun to see up close some of the birds we had learned about and seen in Florida. We also saw quite a few mice running around. And these enclosures were set up so that we COULD have touched a lot of these (though you aren’t supposed to) so conceivably we could have had a mouse run across our foot. Ewww. That’s one animal I don’t love. The only disappointment was poor Dacen. We couldn’t see the ONE bear they had. He LOVES bears. Oh well – he saw the PANDA BEARS!!