San Diego Zoo

We spent Thanksgiving week traveling, driving down Hwy. 1 to get to San Diego. We skipped the first days of camping due to rain and stayed in a hotel in Santa Barbara. The drive down the coast was awesome as always, here are some highlights:

Rough coast around Big Sur
In Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park

McWay Falls dropping into the Pacific
Anouk enjoying the view.

We encountered some elephant seals near Hearst Castle; they were just hanging out, no fighting yet.






We had a nice hotel in San Diego, right along the water, and went to the world famous Zoo the next day. It is amazing how well it is laid out, you feel like you're almost in the animals' natural environment. We started at the Giant Panda exhibit, since it gets pretty crowded during the day:




Next were the gorillas and orangutans:





The hippo exhibit is amazing, you can see them chill underwater, with just their nostrils coming out of the water occasionally to breathe (which causes bubbles under water...). The otter exhibit was also a lot of fun for Anouk, as they are very playful, and so was the petting zoo:



A great day, more pictures from the Wild Animal Park to come.