The penultimate day of our trip involved a journey down to San Diego. An obligatory visit to the zoo was first on the list. The main reason? The baby panda cub!! We were lucky enough to already see two of these insanely cute animals at Atlanta Zoo, but what’s the harm in a second visit? There is none! The journey down was stress free and parking was even easier! We had booked tickets online Wednesday night so we sailed straight through into the park.
Tazmanian Devil
How cute is he/she??? They actually had koalas at the zoo! My kinda animal…they sleep for 22 days. It’s official, if I was an animal, I would be a koala!
What was quite cool about this zoo is they have a buddy system, where a baby cheetah or wolf, gets buddied up to a dog and they are left to bond and get on together. It’s quite sweet really.
The zoo was absolutely huge! We walked five miles round it. I mean I know we’ve gotten lazy with the car and all that, and I said I wanted to walk but crikey, we didn’t realise the zoo was THAT big. They even have a skyfari where you whizz over the zoo in a car-zipline-style thing (can’t recall the exact terminology) so that probably should have given us some clue!
Sun Bear casually grooming itself in the San Diego sun. So, we arrived at the Panda sanctuary in plenty of time (the baby goes away at midday) and we got to see the mum chomping away on her breakfast whilst the baby slept. We had rushed to get there, steamed past people in the queue only to be greeted by a lazy baby panda. Ah well! The mum was fun to watch!
Now, I dislike birds, or anything the flies for that matter, immensely. As a matter of fact, this
is my actual worst nightmare. Nevertheless one bird I was excited to see was the Californian Condor, a bird of which there was only though to be twenty of at one time many years ago!
Their wing span is absolutely massive, and they’re also incredibly ugly! They also had
camels
Elephants
And this cute little tortoise, who actually turned out to be made of stone! There I was happily snapping away until Nathan said “you are aware that’s not real aren’t you?” Errrrr yeah of course I am!!🙄🤔Our journey sauntering through the zoo continued. It was a very good zoo in terms of the fact all the animals were on show! It was probably the most we had seen at one!
Aaaaaaaargh!!!
On the prowl…
The other reason why we came here. We were lucky enough to see polar bears in Prague and I have also seen them in Estonia, but this one woke up especially for us, came to say hi, then crawled back into his den.
These guys couldn’t have gotten any closer to us!
This cute little orange ball of fluff was just monkeying around swinging across the ropes whilst his mum slept. There were lots more animals that we saw and it is a great day out. We spent the best part of three hours there and walked like five miles! We exited the park to walk down into the city to grab a Hard Rock Cafe for lunch. The grid system is great as it makes it very easy to find where you’re going! It didn’t take us too long and we started walking through Balboa Park before we hit the main roads.
The rose gardens were beautiful. The park was huge and is home to 17 museums. We continued walking down Park Blvd past a high school until we hit the skyscrapers.
The roads were empty. We must have only walked past about ten cars! The least amount of cars we’d seen anywhere! Hard Rock seemed to be in the business district and we got there eventually.
The late Chris Cornell’s guitar. The food was delicious as always as was my cocktail. We were only a few blocks from a post office and needed boxes so we ventured in there before heading back via Balboa Park. The sun was shining, the sky was clear, it was warm, the park was beautiful.
These were international houses. Tiny houses from countries all over the world! They weren’t open except for a few hours at the weekends.
The architecture of the buildings throughout here was amazing.
The Japanese Friendship Garden.
The Old Globe
It really was such a beautiful place and I don’t think we even managed to explore all of it! Before we knew it we were back at the car ready to head back to our motel. As standard we chose to leave the city at rush hour so it took a while. Back at the mortal our evening consisted of sorting out our things to send home, repacking our bags, failing to find any internet, trying to ignore the drum n bass music blaring from upstairs and shutting to door in a woman’s face who said “the guy on the stairs freaked her out and what were we doing tonight??!” Think she was a prostitute!
As I said, the first place I didn’t feel safe. It didn’t help the room was so hot and we couldn’t open the window for fear anyone of our neighbours would climb in! Eventually all things were sorted and we nodded off, grateful not to have to set an alarm! Friday was to be our last day…
Until next time….