San Diego Zoo

 Posing with the lion and the bear on arrival.....as you do

 A quick snack with Noah

 Feeding the goats with Skye

 Emma happy with Noah......

 ...and not happy with Michael, Skye, Noah and Caden

 Snake!

I wonder what the reptiles thought. With Alyson

 Emma gets excited to see a lizard that looks like Pascal from Tangled

Michael and I....

 .....and Sarah and Emma on the Skyfari sky ride

Posing with the Polar Bear....

 .......and with the seal

 Trying to get a sneak peek at the Giant Panda without queueing for 45 minutes

Noah and Michael with the koalas.....

.......and pretending to be one with Caden

Together with the bouncing Kangaroos

 I've spotted a couple of health and safety violations here

Caden and Noah on the Camel

 Elephant!

 A prehistoric bird to climb on

Sabre-tooth tiger with the gang

We went on a two car expedition to the zoo on our second Thursday. Sarah, Alyson and I really enjoyed seeing the animals. The kids seemed to be happier climbing on the statues and getting their photos taken.

We took the bus tour at the start. It was fantastic, as it gave you a great way to see most of the animals in a short amount of time. 

All of them were quite excited to get to the petting zoo and feed some goats. It did seem like a long way to travel to see some goats when you can see them just down the road from us in Tullibody, but Michael and Emma loved it. I guess you can't get that level of interaction with the tigers or bears.

The reptile house was fantastic. Michael was very excited to see which snakes were venomous. Sarah didn't like the snake that was getting fed a couple of mice. We went on the skyfari sky gondola ride things afterwards, which Sarah was also less keen on as it was pretty high up. 

The polar bear was amazing. Sarah got some great footage of the kids right up next to it when it was playing with a ball. I'll post that later. There was a queue afterwards to get into a fake helicopter to get your photo taken, but the kids just barged on in regardless of etiquette. 

There was a massive queue to see the giant pandas, which I didn't fancy with the kids and the heat. We went near the exit and caught a couple of glimpses. We spotted a baby panda climbing in the tree which was fantastic. 

The koalas had a weird enclosure where they all had their individual fake trees with mist coming out of the top. There was a trio of people dressed up as Kangaroos doing a musical bouncing routine on a trampoline beside the koalas. The kids loved that, especially when Gangnam Style came on. Kids love that song. 

There was a lot of walking about but with a lot of support from Sarah and Alyson I was ok. The kids were all mostly great. At one point we lost Emma for a couple of minutes and I could feel my stomach drop but she'd just gone a bit further up the path and Sarah caught her.