San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park

[fa:p:a=6-15-wild-animal-park,id=562009372,j=l,s=s,l=i]We had Dinner last night at an Applebees here in San Diego, and did some swimming before we went to bed. But we woke early this morning in order to make it out to the park as the gates opened. It wasn’t as cool as I was expecting for San Diego (although technically, we never were in the city limits), but it was still great weather compared to what we had been through for the rest of the trip. I was able to use my 70-300MM lens almost exclusively in the park, which was a blast. I love the lens, it allows me to get really intimate pictures without having to be close, like this, this or this.

I’m not sure there is a whole lot to say about the park though. Its a nice facility but its pretty much exclusively animals. I did quite enjoy that they have the large basin of non-predatory animals with a tour that goes around the outside stopping for people to take pictures and with a guide telling about the animals. I would have really loved to do one of their special tours, that puts you on the back of a truck and you drive out into the basin. It would have made for some really amazing pictures I’m sure, but since it cost more than the entire fee to get into the park (and Kerry and I unknowingly had 2-day passes) I just couldn’t bring myself to pay.
 
[fa:p:a=6-15-wild-animal-park,id=562421275,j=r,s=s,l=p]We toured just about everything there was to tour in the park, ate lunch (quite good hamburgers at a decent price for park food), did some perusing of the shops and eventually headed out of the park to get on the road again. We headed north, not to far, into Long Beach from the Wild Animal Park to make a quick stop at the Springbok bar, a South African bar. We didn’t stay long. Only long enough really for me to have a Coke, and Kerry to have a Savanna Dry (a SA hard cider). I convinced Kerry we would have dinner at the other Springbok bar near our hotel (a mistake in the end).

So after our short visit, we battled through LA traffic to get to Van Nuys, where our hotel and the other Springbok were located. We dropped off our stuff at the motel (a nice looking, but the sleaziest feeling Super 8 I’ve ever stayed in). I dilly-dallied for a bit, importing and processing the pictures from the park and by the time we made it to the Springbok bar, it was packed and we ended up not eating there, much to Kerry’s dismay. We stopped and got Carl’s Jr on the way back to the motel, and went to bed without our South African meal.