The New Zoo Review

Over spring break, Cora and I needed to get "The Daughter" out of the house to prevent her bottom from grafting to the sofa.  So, I took a day off of work, and we headed to the Brookfield Zoo.  We've done zoo trips before.  We like zoos.  We've hit Chicago's other zoo, The Lincoln Park Zoo, and the zoo in St. Louis last spring break.

We hit the road early, so we could try to beat the crowd.  After all, it was spring break, so everyone would be taking kids to the zoo to get them out of the house.

I coaxed the car down there (it'd been behaving a little odd, and I'd planned to take it in later in the week.), and were a little surprised pulling into the parking lot.  There were a handful of school busses there, and some cars, but the place wasn't as slammed as we expected for the spring break week.

As soon as we got in the gate, we notice the giant carrousel, where the mantis appeared to be preying on the gorilla's arse.

The giraffe, overlooking the whole affair, is above this sort of behavior.

It was a cool spring day, but after the winter we'd just made it through, it was nice to be out in the sun.  And the animals felt the same way, too.  And that's no lion.

It's a tiger.

Since whenever we go any where, Cora usually is the one with a camera in her hands, I do try to sneak an occasional picture of her and The Daughter.  They were checking out the tiger.

Wanna see lions?

Sea lions! Okay, they're grey seals basking in the sun.  But that doesn't work with the joke.  But I did ask the grey seal how did it feel to be so wise. (Elton video)

A little later, I saw a sign warning me that the seals might not be the only things getting wet that day.

Luckily for us, the rhinos stayed along the back wall, and no "lemonade fire hose" action was experienced.

This guy was one of Cora's LEAST favorites.  I guess their weird heads and crazy necks give her the creeps.

Or maybe not, since this guy, with his crazy neck and weird head was her absolute favorite.  We stayed in the giraffe house for a good bit, watching them lick the tops of poles and whatnot with their insane Miley Cyrus tongues.

So I had to do my thing and try to take a picture of something framed by a foreground object.  This "little guy" was still HUGE!

---

And now we come to the part of the show entitled:

MY WIFE INSIDE OF THINGS

---

And we resume our walkthrough is a picture of me, taking a little break from all the walking we've been doing.

And The Daughter hopping and hoping for a prince.  Or at least that our pet frog was this sized.

And before we said, "after while" to the zoo, we had one more place to explore:

The planet of the apes.

But before we did, the girls had to ogle a colorful peacock.

We watched the gorillas fro a while.  I might be hard to see, but the mother ape that is sitting down, has a baby in her arms.

Yes, this is the same habitat where, on August 16, 1996, a 3 year old boy fell in to the gorilla enclosure.  One of the female gorillas protected the boy until zoo personnel could rescue the boy.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find an embeddable video.  So, click HERE if you want to see it.

But, since I know you want to see some monkey business, here's some video I shot.  With my favorite monkey putting in a cameo.

It was a really good day.  We'd taken a lunch and ate it in the car, so saved some serious coin.  And the crowds we were expecting never materialized, so it was like we had the place mostly to ourselves, which was awesome, too.

And after we got home, we took the car up to the shop to see what some of the weird things that it had been doing were and what could be done about them.

But that's a story for another day.