Location: San Diego, California, USA

*sing-song* todayyyy is the dayyyyyyyy!!! We travelled all the way to California for the world class SAN DIEGO ZOOOOOO! And we’re going! Todayyyy!!!

If you know me at all you’ll know I just LOVE the zoo. In another life I was a zookeeper I bet. We speed walked over to a waffle diner, wolfed down some breakfast, and hailed a cab straight to the zoo. No dilly-dallying, we’ve got places to be and animals to see!

A massive bronze lion statue greeted us at the entrance, and I scurried up to it, shoved my phone at some poor stranger and dragged Garrett under it for a photo. I was in tears. I was literally crying and grinning ear to ear. The grinning lasted the entire day… the scurrying (and thankfully the crying) did not.

The last time I was here was over 10 years ago, and my little brother Charlie and I ran around the entire zoo as fast as we could to make sure we saw absolutely every single animal in the few hours we had. I cannot fathom how we ever did that, because Garrett and I spent 10 full hours exploring every nook and cranny at what felt like a pretty respectable speed! While we slowed down significantly for the last couple hours of the day, I also don’t feel like we dawdled much. How the heck did Charlie and I do it in less than half the time?!

I have no idea how to even talk about the day because we saw hundreds of animals and I was ecstatic the entire time. Garrett criss-crossed in front of me, heading from exhibit to exhibit but getting distracted constantly by the next wonderful animal ‘Sav did you see this one?!’ I was just mouth open, jaw on the ground the whole time. ‘Look at this one we missed! This is amazing!’ I’m 75% sure Garrett shed a tear when we saw a donkey.

With all of that in mind here, are some stand-out moments of the day, in no particular order:

• A little teeny desert Fennec Fox snuffling her face in the sand. Garrett had to physically pull me away from this exhibit.
• A slippery little Axolotl smiling at us through his tank.
• A Screaming Pihas bird basically unhinging its jaw to yell at Garrett.
• A big old tiger flapping his huge paws around in his sleep, whiskers twitching away.
• Underwater sleeping Hippos, whose bums were right near the glass.
• A lion sleeping like a house cat with his neck craned backwards over the edge of a platform, tongue hanging out (so graceful).
• A chimpanzee basically telling an annoying zoo patron to ‘kiss her ass’ by turning around, sticking her butt in his face and pointing at it.
• An orangutang baby rolling around in the grass with her mother.
• A Leopard curled up like in a cute but scary cinnamon bun.
• A meerkat having an existential crisis.
• The sound of African Penguin feet flip-flapping on pebbles.

The whole day I felt so lucky to be here, and so pleased that Garrett was equally excited to see everything. Even near the end when I was forcing one foot in front of the other, I was jittery and would have stayed hours longer if it wasn’t closing time (and if I could get a little electric scooter or something!). Garrett used the word ‘fantastic’ probably 50+ times today, and I couldn’t have picked a better one.

Absolutely fantastic.

Sav