St Louis Zoo

This is the last installment of the St Louis mini break blog series (we only stayed overnight!) & it's about our visit to the zoo. We were zoo members in 2020, with the idea that we'd go 6 or so times -- you can guess  how that turned out. Sam checked at the services desk on the off chance that we still had a membership benefit, but it had expired and we never used it once, even with the extra time they added onto the end because of the shutdowns. Oh well! We did get a calendar in the mail and there were spaces to park on the street this time so the visit was free. 

We got to meet up with our friends Samantha & Jonathan, too. Here's Leah at the turtle park near the south entrance to the zoo. We packed some hoagies and no-bake cookies to eat before we went in. I forgot that there were no picnic tables :)

We had to sign up for a time in advance to go & picked the 1:00-5:00pm slot, but didn't stay quite the whole time. It really didn't seem appreciably less crowded than any other time I've gone to the zoo, though - maybe not height-of-summer-on-a-nice-weekend crowded, but there were a lot of people there (or maybe I'm just not used to folks after a year at home, since there was plenty of close street parking - we were actually in the lot for the turtle park). 

The elephants were out enjoying the weather. 

We saw one stand up on his hind legs after being sprayed down for a bath. 

As always, the kids enjoyed the prairie dogs eating salad in their colony (not pictured). We also saw the polar bear and gorillas and capybara and rhino and probably some other animals that I'm forgetting. We did have to wait just a bit to go in the reptile house. 

Even though we aren't members, we did ride the train at the end - all the way around plus one extra stop to get us back to our entrance. There were no folks in line when we bought tickets and we didn't have to wait at all. Leah decided to just peace out and go do something more interesting while we were 1st waiting in line for the train to come by, though, and my coworker hopped the chain and quickly brought her back!

She looks a little grumpy here, though she was in good spirits! This was our inaugural zoo trip without a stroller. 

There's a smile: 

I wonder if they'll just leave the plexiglass up between seats after the pandemic. I told James he could take his mask off at the end, since he got hot and grumpy (and had been pooped on twice by a bird!) 

We got a view of the tiger from the train: 

Sam took a weird video of the wall going through one of the tunnels - I have a memory of this being totally dark when I was a kid, but maybe that's not right! Or not on this particular tunnel.  Oops - not many pics of Amelie!

After the zoo, we parted ways with our friends and drove to the hotel. Sam picked us up some dinner & brought it back to eat in the room and then there was a torrential downpour of rain (I mentioned this in the Cahokia post) but skies were thankfully clear for us both days. He signed up for a slot to swim at the hotel (the only time open was 8-9pm) and took the kids to do that while I got some alone time in the room. 

It was a good mini-break!