PlanJam!From your screen to the scene

Since today was our 6 month anniversary, I decided to take my girlfriend Liz to the Los Angeles Zoo. The weather was great so I wanted to take advantage of it by doing something fun outdoors.

12:00pm – We arrived at the Zoo at Noon and I was surprised that there was no charge for parking. You would think that finding parking would be almost impossible, but there were a ton of open spaces right near the entrance.

At first glance, the line to purchase tickets looks really intimidating, but it does move really quickly. We got to the ticket window in about 25 minutes and the price of admission was a reasonable $10 per person (children get in for $5).

We quickly glanced at the program of shows and there was nothing too impressive…about a half dozen shows centered on birds. That didn’t matter though, I came there to see the Tigers and Lions (btw, I love cats).

Since it was a warm day and we stood in line for about half an hour, we were a little hot so we decided to get a cold treat. Liz went for the Shaved Italian Ice, at $5.95, and I went for the Dippin Dots which were priced at $4.35. Now that we had cooled down a bit, we were ready to go explore the zoo!

As we walked from exhibit to exhibit, we couldn’t help but notice that almost all of the animals were either sleeping or hiding. This made it really frustrating after taking multiple detours around the zoo to get to them. Specifically, we were unable to see the Snow Leopard, Tigers, Bears, and Wolves. The only animal we were actually able to see during our first hour was the Tortoise, which really had nowhere to go. Now I am not sure if you have ever seen a Tortoise in real life, but it’s not that exhilarating.

It may have just been the time we decided to visit, but we were getting really annoyed having to play “Where’s Waldo” at each exhibit. The second half of our visit was a little more fun. They got around to feeding the hippopotamuses which allowed for some great close-up shots. There was also a family of Orangutans which were absolutely adorable and the Koalas were really cute (see pictures below).

We were at the Zoo for a total for 2.5 hours and we weren’t really rushing through it. All in all we had a wonderful time, but the selection of animals was far from spectacular. And no, I didn’t get to see any cats (which was a little disappointing). In the future we will probably take a trip down to San Diego and visit the Zoo there.

If you’ve never been to the Los Angeles Zoo, I would really suggest that you check it out (plus its right next door to Griffith Park where you can set up a picnic). But if you frequent Zoos often, you may get a little bored here.

Total Cost: $30.30

Total Time: 2.5 Hours