The Zoo

This year we decided to stay home for Christmas and hopefully establish a couple of traditions. On Christmas Eve we went to the San Diego Zoo and actually managed to get out the house pretty quickly that morning. Our first stop was to see the meerkats, Dominic loves them. There were only two in the first exhibit, but the zoo has three different exhibits and I think we hit them all. After this we took the bus tour which allowed us to see the majority of the zoo without having to walk for 3 miles. Dominic was thrilled to see the polar bears and elephants. After the tour we saw some camels, ate some lunch, and saw some more meerkats. We then walked down one of the canyons and saw some big cats. We finished up at the gorilla enclosure, which was located near the pygmy hippos (notable in that their tank has lots of little fish, I don't think Dominic noticed the hippos.) We all had a great time and we ended up staying a lot longer (4 hours) than we expected to (2 hours). Both Dominic and Joss were very tired and both were asleep within 5 minutes of getting back into the car.

Momma and baby gorilla.
DominicsMom and Dominic at the Wallaby exhibit.
DominicsDad and Dominic by the camels.
Polar bear!
Dominic looks at the meerkats.
Zoo humor.

This is a bad angle, the candy cane is actually a few inches away from the statue.

For our trip to the Zoo, I was able to open one of my Christmas gifts a bit early. I received a Panasonic Lumix FZ7 camera and this was my first opportunity to use it! Its a great camera and is a huge improvement over our first camera, which while nice has a large time lag between photos. With the FZ7 there is barely a pause, even with the flash on. I was really excited to try it out! It is from the same family as DominicsAunt Laurie's camera, but it doesn't have all the features that hers does. For the gear-heads and computer-types, it has a Leica 12x optically stabilized zoom lens, 6Mp resolution, 30 fps VGA video, and is really quick between shots. I almost filled two 256 MB memory cards at the zoo, so a couple of days ago I purchased a 1 GB memory card. I'm still exploring all of its features.

Whew! Got that geek computer stuff is out of my system...

DominicsDad