Wednesday - January 30, 2008

Today was a wonderful day, the weather was cool but mainly sunny so a good day for walking around the zoo. Jeans, a t-shirt and my nylon wind breaker were perfect and kept me comfortable for the day.

The bus left our pick up spot right at 6:30 a.m., made one more stop at their downtown office to pick up a few more people and we were on our way. We stopped at El Centro for breakfast about 7:45 and were quickly on our way again. From there to San Diego was new territory for John and I and it was an interesting drive. We went through quite a high mountain pass with very large rocks, very barren looking! About the top of the pass the sky got very black and it looked like we were going to be in for a storm but fortunately that didn’t happen and it was sunny by the time we arrived in San Diego around 10 a.m.

Some of the people on the bus were doing a whale watching tour, some were doing Old Town and then there were 6 of us doing the zoo, fortunately we were the last ones to be dropped off so got to see the harbour, old town and downtown San Diego – it looks like a very interesting city.

The zoo was absolutely fabulous, among others I have been to the Detroit, Toronto and Sydney Australia zoos and I have to say San Diego is the nicest one and we couldn’t believe how clean it was.

The first thing we did was take the aerial ride across the park, what a great view and it let us off near the polar bears – they were fun to watch and the one had an absolutely huge bone he was gnawing on.

We saw the two year old panda sitting enjoying his lunch of bamboo, then next was his mother and 4 month old brother and it was a riot to watch them playing. They were rolling around with each other then the little guy would try to climb a tree and mom would haul him back down but he was very persistent with his efforts to climb the tree. One of the panda keepers said they had been playing for over an hour so we were fortunate to see them at play. We also saw a mother anteater, she was the largest one I have ever seen, and her baby was on her back. She was trying to shake the young one off and make him walk but he was holding on for dear life and having no part of being parted from mom, fun to watch them. Of course I enjoyed the koalas, they are so cute but can be very vicious.

Because of the incident at the Los Angeles zoo the tigers weren’t out, they are adding to the height of the wire around their area and until it is done they won’t be out – disappointing. We walked around most of the zoo then took a 35 minute bus tour to see what we missed, we sat on the top of a double decker so had a good view – and it was just nice to sit for a while! When we walked around the elephant area there was only one out but when we went by on the tour there were 4 and one of them was pulling at an object hanging from a large piece of wood, the driver said there was food in it and the elephant sure was reefing on it trying to get at the food – quite funny to watch.

By the time the tour was over we had about 20 minutes before we had to meet our bus so Janet & I wandered through a couple of shops while John and Dave went through the reptile house.

On the way home we stopped at Alpine for dinner, there were a number of places to eat so we decided on a barbecue restaurant that turned out to be good and very reasonable. There was another quick stop at El Centro on the way back and we were dropped off at our truck about 9 p.m. – weary but having enjoyed a really great day.

I still have to go through my pictures, as well as John’s, so will wait until tomorrow to post this and some pictures.

And so ends another great day in our life of retirement and we are looking forward to another great day tomorrow.