December 31, 2007

December 31, 2007

We spent New Years Eve with a bunch of animals. The animals of the St. Louis Zoo. After passing thru the main entrance and checking the map we decided to walk in the opposite direction from the tiger cage. With the recent news of the San Francisco tiger escape, Aimee saw no need to push our luck. Instead of man-eating tigers though, we immediately came face to face with a pair of huge Grizzly Bears. The Grizzlies’ cage-free home here allows a very up close and personal visit. A little too close. If it didn’t look like the bears were well fed I might have worried about them crawling up the not-so-high wall.

It is nice visiting a zoo in the off-season. No crowds and some of the animals even enjoy the winter weather. The polar bear looked like he was enjoying a summer day at the beach. He spent the whole time in his private pool floating on his back and trying to balance a beach ball on his nose. Unfortunately for us, the zoo closed early for New Years and we had to fly thru the rest of the park. Oh well, we need to head home early anyway before the real animals hit the street. The St. Louis Zoo is clearly the best of the few zoos I have visited. What I was most impressed with was how clean and shiny all the animals’ coats were. Like they just came from the beauty parlor. We saw a baboon that looked like its long flowing hair was recently washed, blown-dry and run thru a kinking iron.

Since we had a little extra time, on the way back to Godfrey we stopped under the Clark Bridge over the Mississippi and watched several bald eagles soaring in the distance. None came close enough for a good photo opportunity.