This week, Cates and I had mid-winter break – An amazing invention that we have in the Pacific Northwest but I’d never heard of before we moved here. Basically, we get this entire week off six weeks after Winter Break and six weeks before Spring Break. It is simply great and I highly recommend it. This year, with a trip to Florida planned for Spring Break and our big trip to England planned for summer, most of the week saw Cates and I hanging out at home while Emily worked and Wickham went to school. However, this past Monday was Presidents’ Day and all four of us had the day off. We decided that rather than sitting around the house, we should take a day trip. It didn’t take much time to decide that we wanted to have a return visit to the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma. We hadn’t been back since the new aquarium opened and it is just far enough away to feel like we “went somewhere” without really feeling like we were in the car all day.
Since it was Presidents’ Day, many others also had the day off which made traffic quite light and easy. We actually arrived at the zoo about 10 minutes before we thought we would and had to wait for it to open. Once inside, our first stop was naturally the new Pacific Seas Aquarium. We spent a little over an hour inside the aquarium which included being present to watch the divers come into the big tank to clean it which was accompanied by a staff member on our side of the tank not only describing what they had to do to clean the tank, but also explained a lot about the various sea life in the tank. This included the kids being able to don a fish or turtle costume if they wanted. Wickham wanted to be a hammerhead, Cates wanted to stay as Cates. Before leaving the aquarium, we also got touch some sea stars and anemones.
After leaving the aquarium, we wandered around the Arctic section of the park which included walruses, seals, sea lions, and polar bears. The walruses were quite active and amazingly agile under water. While we knew this going in, it was cool to be able to go down into a building to see them swimming under water (this particular part of the walrus enclosure was closed on our previous visit.
Other highlights of the day included catching the “big show” of the day at the zoos amphitheater where zoologists brought out many different animals including a South American porcupine, a South American armadillo (which is smaller than the US variety and can actually go totally roly-poly and ball itself up), and a bald eagle who has lived at the zoo for 20 years after a run-in with a power line that left it unable to live in the wild due to an injured wing. We also happened across the tiger show in the afternoon. Normally, I’m not a huge fan of big cats being kept in a zoo, though I did appreciate hearing from the zoologist about what they are do to not only educate but use their resources to help stabilize and grow the wild tiger population in Sumatra (where their tigers are from). I also appreciated that the show was really the tiger sitting in a natural setting on the other side of a small water feature while we were gathered around the zoologist. She was making raw, red meat meatballs and throwing them to the tiger which explains why she was willing to sit in one area for a bit while we learned about her and her sister’s lives.
We finished our day as we do most zoo visits – with a ride on the carousel; Wickham chose the walrus and Cates chose the merhorse. It wasn’t very late when we left, so we went around to Point Defiance Park for a few minutes to have a snack and let the kids run around some more (and play with the light sabers that Wickham got as his souvenir #bogo) before heading back to Seattle.
It was a fairly simple day and it was a lot of fun. The kids were both excited and well-behaved all day, we randomly ran across three different live shows with zoo staff showing animals and talking about what they do at the zoo to promote conservation, and they are both big enough to walk on their own the whole time meaning we could move a lot faster and Emily and I weren’t always having to manage a stroller. Doing life with these people is a lot of fun and we can’t wait for our next big trip this summer!
Enjoying the water fountain with the activator button that is 20 feet away. There were plenty of shenanigans…”no really, try again, I promise I won’t stop it THIS time…”
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