"Hey Rock - Take Her To The Zoo!"

The San Diego Zoo, of course. The zoo bills itself as not only the largest and most comprehensive in the country but also the zoo which has made the best effort at placing their animals in the most natural setting possible to make them feel as comfortable as they might in the wild. It's too bad they didn't put a little more thought into how comfortable the human visitors might feel in these "natural surroundings." Unless you're in California-beach-body shape, you'll get a real workout making your way up and down the somewhat confusing paths which twist and turn through this jungle. We made the intelligent decision to take the introductory forty minute bus ride, along with all the other seasoned citizens. Should you ever visit here, it's really terrific. You'll feel even better about it at the end of the day when, although you've only seen half the critters, you feel like you've just finished The Bataan Death March. At one point I literally had to pull myself up this steep, seemingly endless slope so I could see the polar bears who rewarded my effort with a vibrant and exciting display of them sleeping off lunch. Of course Mary Ellen didn't miss the opportunity to remark "No wonder they're your favorite animal - they love the cold, they're large, white and asleep." Isn't she just so cute?

Check out the plumage on this dude. He's strutting his stuff because he just got done beating up a rival for one of the girls in the back. Every once in a while they'll all start cackling, seemingly in unison, as they take a few laps around the pool. I have no idea what that is about except that it is impressive to see a gang of brightly colored orange swans on stilts tearing around their enclosure

Of all the animals Mary Ellen wanted to see, this was her favorite. Koalas are a bit bigger than I thought they were; had this guy been standing up he probably would have been close to two feet tall. But they are as cute and cuddly as you'd expect them to be after seeing them in the old Quantas commercials. They're not actually bears but rather marsupials, the creatures that carry their young in a pouch like their countrywomen the kangaroos.

Meet Montana and Scout, two almost fully-grown Grizzly bear brothers from Yellowstone National Park. The reason they're in San Diego now instead of Wyoming is because their mother was bringing them up by teaching them to raid garbage cans in Yellowstone. Since that's the prime reason human/bear encounters go badly (usually for the humans) social services stepped in and banished mom to Idaho and the two boys to foster care in sunny San Diego. They have two huge enclosures and can be separated when brothers begin doing what brothers love to do the most - beating the hell out of each other. But perhaps these two won't have that problem; right after I took this picture one began humping the other. Hey, it's California...

Unbelievably, these are the only pictures I think are worth posting. Everyone reading this has probably been to the safari ride at Great Adventure, seen the giraffes, lions and rhinos while the baboons are doing their best to rip the vinyl off your car's roof. We did wait in line to see the pandas but I still can't figure out what the fuss is all about. OK so they're rare and hard to breed in captivity but once you've seen them...I'd much rather be mauled to death by Montana and Scout (as long as they don't start humping me first) than be gummed silly by Hu Sun Ling or whatever the hell its name is. Being a teacher whose favorite subject was science, Mary Ellen was also quite annoyed that the zoo person who was giving a running lecture on the pandas as we shuffled past never mentioned that they're really not bears but members of the raccoon family. Ha! I'll take an All-American Grizzly or Kodiak bear over some glorified raccoon from The People's Republic.

Tomorrow we break heap-big-camp on the Pechango Indian Reservation and head further south for four days at the Santee Lakes Park near El Cajon. We were there the same day we visited the zoo and I have to admit, Californians may be a little whacky but they sure know how to put together and run their parks. Turkey Swamp it ain't...