23Aug2008: Day 90: Whipsnade Zoo

After much debating, we decided to go to a zoo so that Makenna could enjoy a day instead of being dragged around to see things she could care less about. The Woburn Safari was right there--the one that Makenna and I went to a couple of weeks ago when we were up this way, but we decided to see something different, and went to the Whipsnade Zoo. It's run by the same group that runs the London Zoo.

It is definitely a big zoo. Things were spread out all over the place and we had a hard time getting from one thing to the next. There were a lot of different demonstrations with different animals throughout the day and for some reason, they scheduled the elephant demonstration and then you only had 15 minutes to get all the way over to the penguins. Unfortunately, we saw that some people were allowed to drive cars throughout the zoo. Not sure how they got to be so special, but we're guessing that they might have purchased a year pass.

Makenna wanted to touch a lot of the animals she saw, but unfortunately, they didn't have any petting area, that we found. There might have been one, but like I said, things were so scattered, and not much explanation of what some of the areas were. There was one area that was like a playground and it has bounce house and a big bouncy slide. Makenna went into the bounce house and wanted to do the slide, but obviously couldn't. She also got to ride one of those rides that you see outside of grocery stores that you put in 50 cents. She really is into driving. Every time we go to the car she starts saying "home, home" which means that she wants to drive. When we give her a few minutes to play with the steering wheel and other instruments, she gets extremely upset when we tell her, her time is up.

She did fairly well but we weren't' sure if she could really see all of the animals. She seemed to really like the sea lions, especially when she could go underneath to see them swim from below. She finally fell asleep by the time we got to the giraffes.

I wish we had more of an idea of what some of the other areas had, such as a petting zoo area, or not, and there was a building that said Discovery Center, which we never got to. We did find it trying to get to the penguin area, an awesome view which you can see below

We left, expecting lots of heavy traffic, but it wasn't too bad, of course, I fell asleep as Chris drove us to Costco. We seem to get to stores with about 10 minutes before they close. So Chris rushed around to get us some of the things we needed. We headed home, but the Tom-Tom all of a sudden had a glitch and against Chris's better judgement, followed it, which then took us back the other way and back across a toll bridge, and about 9 miles out of the way before we could turn back around and pay the toll for the third time to then get home. We're now trying to decide what to do for Monday as it's a holiday, Bank Holiday they call it. I guess it's like our Labor Day, in a sense, and they call it Bank Holiday because the banks are closed.