Predator Day

Mike and I are always on the hunt for fun things to do. One day, he came across the Predator Breakfast at the Hogle Zoo.

The description:"From birds of prey to leopards, learn what some of the animals are having for breakfast at the Zoo while you enjoy your own breakfast. Meet some animal friends up close and make a treat for an animal friend."

Okay. How awesome does that sound? We get to see predators eat (close up!), and we get breakfast, and a treat for an animal friend! All for about twice the entrance fee, but we thought it sounded totally worth it. Unfortunately...

The reality: We arrived at the Edzoocation Center all ready for our day at the zoo, and for breakfast. There were mostly kids there, but we had expected that. Our zoo-ranger-tour guide introduced herself and invited us to get our breakfasts and get ready for the first presentation. Hooray!

And then we got to the table. Good thing we don't have some diabetes or something, because all they had were (not at all good) sugary little pastries, apples, juice, and like 10 slices of cantaloupe. It was too early for that much sugar. "But, hey," we thought, "we're really here for the predator coolness."

I still think predators are probably pretty cool. But you know what's not the coolest way to learn about them? PowerPoints. Not that exciting.

Luckily, we got to make treats for an animal friend during PowerPoint time. But not zoo friends. At home animal friends. And we don't have any of those, so I made Mike a bracelet. "Still," we reassured each other, "there's still the animal feeding part. That will be worth it."

It was finally time to go see a real life predator eat it's real life breakfast. At exactly this point, the zoo ranger mentions that our tickets did not include entry to the zoo (which we had naturally assumed) except for the animal feeding. Nowhere had this been mentioned before. Not on the website, the tickets, the first part of the breakfast. And we paid a lot of money for that. We were grumpy, to say the least, as we trudged along to the wolf den.

While we were there we got to see two wolves eat some liver out of a box. It was pretty cool. Not voraciously awesome or anything. More like, a big dog happily eating a treat cool. But, hey, wolves eating raw liver was something.

When we got back to the edzoocation center, we were a little peeved that we had paid double and gotten just about none of the things we had expected. If we paid the admission fee on top of what we had already paid, we would be close to $50... and that seemed a bit absurd. We ended up talking to guest services, and that smooth talking (good looking!) Mike got us into the zoo after all (for no additional fee), and that was great because the rest of the zoo trip was super fun.

One of my favorite stops was to see the elephants. We caught the end of a little training show and then we got to see the baby elephant. It was adorable.

We thought it was pretty neat that the giraffes stood right next to the doorway so we could tell that they are exactly 14 feet tall.

I learned an important fact about penguins. They are only found in the southern hemisphere. Not in Alaska at all. So, they don't actually frolic about with polar bears drinking Coca Cola. In other bird news, we went to this amazing bird show. The trainer has the birds do tricks and swoop right over your heads. We were so enthralled we didn't even think of taking pictures.

These drinking fountains give me the biggest kick. Best idea ever.

Despite the initial setback of the Predator Breakfast being kind of lame and making us sad...
... it ended up being a really fun day!