2014 San Diego Vacation 3: The Zoo, The Rain, And The Beach

So, Tuesday was looking to be the most weather-affected day on our trip. The skies were gray and glowering, and everyone in drought stricken California was dancing with happiness. We, however, were not. A rainy day at a theme park is not generally on the list of top vacation draws. But when it comes to weather, you just gotta make do with what get, because there's no changing it. We decided to go with the zoo as our destination today, since we'd probably be the least upset if we were sent home early by bad weather. After all, a zoo is a zoo, right? And there are zoos everywhere.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious. Yes, a zoo is a zoo, but the San Diego Zoo is well known as being one of the best zoos in the entire country. It's a really big zoo with a whole lot of animals. It's so big that you're pretty much guaranteed to be unable to see everything in one day. The ideal way to deal with the San Diego Zoo is to start off with the bus. 

The best thing about the San Diego Zoo buses is that they are double-deckers. Outside of London, England, you don't really get a lot of chances to ride on a double-decker. The bus ride will take you around and give you a glimpse of as many animals as possible in a short period of time.

My daughter said her favorite animal was a tiger, so we made our way to the tiger habitat. Zoo workers told her not to get her heart too set on seeing the tiger, because it liked to hide away from view, but we lucked out, and were able to see it pacing back an forth on an upper ledge.

We got lucky to get a really good look at several animals, because, even though they had big pens to roam around it, they still came right over to the closest place for viewing. Like this hippopotamus for example.

The polar bear did the same thing:

The biggest draw at the San Diego Zoo is the panda bear. There are less than 3,000 pandas in the whole world, and very few in zoos outside of China itself. So, San Diego is pretty proud to have some of their own. They built a giant enclosure for it with theater-style seating because it's so popular. On a rainy morning, however, the line to see the pandas was much shorter than usual. In fact it was non-existent. Which is very cool, because we passed a sign on our way in saying that the wait was thirty minutes from that point. Glad we didn't have to wait for that, because I'm not sure if I would have.

The panda sat with its back to us and chomped on bamboo while we were there. I tried my best to get a photo from a different angle that showed its face, but it didn't happen.

At about one o'clock, just as we were viewing the polar bear, the rain started to get really bad. So, we decided to finish our day at the zoo by taking the sky ride back to the front gate. You've seen sky rides before, they have them at every amusement park pretty much. I really wanted to go on this one. Seems like a weird thing to really want to try, but there's a reason for it. You see, this was not the first time I'd been to the San Diego Zoo. My family actually visited the zoo all the way back in 1982.

For a long time, I've been my family's official photo and video guy. Scanning and preserving stuff for the future. Years ago, as I was going through our old slides looking at pictures like the one above, I found this really cute picture of my sister with my mom on the San Diego Zoo sky ride.

It was Christmastime, so I got a special frame, had a print made up of the photo, and gave it to my sister for her gift. Something about it stuck with me. I loved the picture, and now here we were in the same zoo right next to that same sky ride. So, I made sure we went on it, and I did my best to get a similarly cute picture of Little with my wife.
 

 Once we got back to the front gate, we quickly ran to the gift shop, and hid away from the rain. It was really coming down at this point, and it was a good thing we were on our way out the door, because sticking around would have been really miserable. Some of the kids got stuffed animals from the exhaustive selection as her souvenirs, and we were ready to go. Everyone remained huddled in the gift shop, while I ran out to the car and brought it close for them.

We decided we would spend the rest of the day in the beach house's living room, watching some DVDs we would rent from the Redbox. Everybody wanted to see The Guardians of the Galaxy, but the Redbox we found at a 7-11 by our house did not have that movie. We tried to talk them into something else, but they wouldn't budge. My wife used her phone and the Redbox website to locate the closest Redbox kiosk that had Guardians of the Galaxy, we dropped the kids off at home, and we headed in that direction.

The rain was ferocious on our drive south toward that other 7-11, but right about the time we arrived, the storm broke. We got our movies, but as we drove home, the skies cleared more and more. By the time we got home, it looked as though there had never been a storm at all. Since we were only blocks from the beach, and we could watch movies anytime anywhere, we changed our plan. We'd watch the movie later on tonight or even later this week if we had to. Right now, we were going to the beach.

After such a downpour, you don't expect it to instantaneously be beautiful, but it was.

The kids went right to work building sandcastles.

The rest of the time, we played in the waves.

It was an absolutely beautiful afternoon, and once again, we were on the beach as the sun set. On this trip, I became somewhat of an expert at sunset pictures. I took a lot of them. This one was my favorite of today's batch.

Darkness descended, and soon we had to quit playing and go home.

But again, spending time on the beach was so relaxing and wonderful. There's just something about that place where the ocean meets the land that makes me, my wife, and so many other people happy.

Now it was time to go home, eat some dinner, and watch a movie.