Our Last Visit to the Minnesota Zoo in 2016
Todd Swank's Diary Entry for April 24, 2016
It was Sunny's 11th birthday so that means wear a hat, pose for a picture, and get a free birthday muffin! He's been down this road before.
On Friday night, we went out for dinner and some fun with our old buddies, Jason and Jen. It was disco night at the casino so we had to get down there and have some Boogie Fever.
On Saturday morning, we picked up Grandma Linda for our final Minnesota Zoo visit of 2016. Now theoretically it's possible we'll go there again this year, but I highly doubt it. We're letting our membership expire and I'm not sure when any of us will want to go again badly enough to renew it. We will just have to see who gets the zoo desire first.
The Minnesota Zoo is home to the 71st Whaling Wall painted by artist Robert Wyland.
According to Wikipedia, Mr Wyland painted his first whaling wall in 1981 and this one was painted in 1997. His 100th whaling wall was painted in 2008 in Beijing for the Olympics. I've always been a fan of Robert Wyland's work so it's cool seeing one of his murals at our local zoo.
Next to the Whaling Wall is a large pond where the zoo is attempting to get Trumpeter Swans to be reintroduced in Minnesota. Apparently they were hunted out of existence in the state back in the 1880's and the zoo would like to fix that. The way these two were following each other around all day, I'm guessing they're getting ready to do their part to help bring back some population.
We surprised the moose when walking by. At least I assumed we surprised him because he didn't have his big ole rack of horns on yet for our visit.
I don't think these ducks were an official part of the zoo exhibits so we clapped our hands and screamed at them to get out of the zoo so they wouldn't steal any of the official zoo animal's thunder.
Grandma Linda likes the animals. And we like Grandma Linda so it was a pretty good day at the zoo.
I like turtles.
I always get camels and dromedaries mixed up and which has one hump and which has two. The sign says these were camels and as far as I could tell they had two humps. So that cleared up hump questions for the day.
I noticed someone needs to clean up the donkey yard. That's gotta be a pretty big pooper scooper.
This prairie dog was working on something with a lot of intensity. I like to think it was a really tiny Rubik's Cube.
I couldn't tell if the leopard was feeling really lazy or was contemplating tearing somebody apart right outside his cage. I'm just not very good at reading leopards yet.
I liked the pigs until somebody told me they were wild boars. I don't know why they get called that because they seemed pretty exciting to me.
The bears seemed to all still be hibernating. Or maybe they were just sleeping. It's hard for me to tell the difference.
On Saturday night, we went to our friends, the Zitzewitzes, to hang out with them and the Brown family. I'm not being racist or anything. That's just their last name.
Troy likes to bring as much meat as he can possibly carry whenever he goes anywhere.
Karl is a huge fan of Troy's meat and takes really good care of it until it's time to share it with the rest of us.
That is some good looking meat.
We all had a pretty happy night enjoying the meat and a bunch of other good food on a stick. Good times with good friends.
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