Places to Go: Washington DC Zoo

We do a lot of fun things outside of our home as a family.  I find having this blog be only about the art we do is somewhat limiting.  I decided today to start another part of the blog about some of the places we visit.  Mostly we are in and around Pittsburgh where we live, but my husband loves a good road trip and plans lots of fun things to do.  Together in the last ten years of marriage we have traveled to almost all the states, parts of Canada, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.  We find traveling with kids to be a bit difficult, but always do-able.  Sometimes my mother thinks we are crazy with some of the things we do with three kids in tow, but it makes life interesting and fun.  I think if we knew how to make money doing it we would be worldwide travelers for a living.

Recently we took a trip to Washington DC.  One of the days there we spent at the Washington DC zoo.

The best thing about this zoo is the fact that it is free.  We have a zoo pass at our zoo at home so it wasn't as important for us to see all of it so we spent only a few hours seeing some of the things we wanted to see there.

My favorite animal area we saw was the elephants habitat.  It was really cool to see them from above and they had so much room so I didn't feel sorry for them as much as I normally do.

The DC zoo has panda bears.  I hadn't seen pandas before and neither had the kids so I was excited for this exhibit, but unfortunately they weren't on display on the particular day we went.  It was a really nice area for them as well just wish they were out and about.

The lion exhibit was great because they had a bunch of little cubs recently and so it was cute to see a whole lion family out resting around.

It was a really hot day and in DC that also means it is really humid.  If you aren't used to humidity you will be even more grateful for the misters they have all over the zoo.  If you have kids like mine you will find that they spend more time in the misters than looking at the animals.

Overall the DC zoo is great.  They had a lot of animals and we could have spent far more time there than we did.  My suggestion is taking your own food into the zoo.  The food there is more outrageous than most places I have been, but the grocery stores in DC were also much more expensive than we are used to as well.    You have to pay for parking unless you are willing to walk, but you can't beat the free entry price.

I generally ask my kids lots of questions as we are at the zoo so that they have to think to answer the question or look closer to figure it out.  I have thought that it would be fun to get them some disposable cameras and let them do the picture taking.  Do you do anything when you go to the zoo with your kids to make it more educational?