Saturday was my birthday, and I turned mid-thirties. Not so bad in the grand scheme of things, but when you still kind of think you are 20, it is a little too old. Regardless of my personal preference however, time marches on, and this year, like last year, I was away for an opera gig on my big day. Luckily, my family was able to come visit this time, as New York is much closer to Vermont than Florida was. With wife and kids in town, and a miraculous free day from the Met, we decided to take a train up to the Bronx to visit the zoo.
We are big zoo people, although that may be because we lived in Washington, DC for a long time where the zoo is awesome and free. When we lived in Baltimore we hardly ever went to the zoo, and when we did we traveled back to DC to do it. Just before we moved home to Vermont, we did take a trip to the Baltimore Zoo, and it was actually pretty awesome as well (but less free). We got to feed a giraffe and everything! So anyway, we love zoos, but none of us had ever been to the Bronx Zoo, arguably one of the top zoos in the country, if not the world. Clearly we had no choice but to check it out.
In order to get to the zoo we had to ride the subway, and honestly I think my kids would have been thrilled to just do that all day. Ruby was excited to stand up and hold the pole all by herself, and Edward just yelled “CHOO-CHOO!” at the top of his lungs for most of the ride. Sadly for everyone else on the train, we eventually got off, and Edward screamed “BYE CHOO-CHOO!” at them as we walked away, down 2,000 flights of stairs and up four blocks to the zoo entrance.
To take in the entirety of the zoo, I feel confident in my non-exaggeration by saying you would probably need three full days. We knew from the outset that we had only one day, and that the children would become tired and cranky well before the day was over. Accordingly, we planned out the whole schedule in advance and started our day with the African animals. Ruby was very pleased to have heard a lion yawn, and we saw our first peacocks of the day.
The peacocks became a recurring motif throughout the day, as they tend to wander freely about the zoo, eating french fries and making loud noises. Every time we found a peacock on the path, Ruby would laugh really hard and tell us that another peacock had escaped. Edward enjoyed feeding them his lunch, and we all had made a lot of peaocky friends by the end of it.
Because we had purchased the online discounted total experience passes in advance, we were able to see the 4-D Dora and Diego movie, which the kids loved. Now, I thought the 4th dimension was time, so therefore all 3-D movies are really in 4-D since they include a running time, but apparently this is not the case. 4-D just means your seats shake and they squirt things at you. The movie was geared towards little kids for sure, but who doesn’t enjoyed being shaken around and squirted in the face? Needless to say, it was enjoyed by all.
Everyone’s favorite part of the zoo was the gorilla section. To start out, there is a little movie about the gorillas and efforts to protect them, and when the movie is over the curtains pull back dramatically to reveal a large enclosure filled with…nothing. I mean, I guess sometimes there are some gorillas there, but all we got were trees. Luckily we were then ushered into the next room over, where there were plenty of gorillas.
Another highlight for us was the children’s zoo area, where they had human prairie dog tunnels for kid to climb in, rope spider webs to climb up, and tons of other cool stuff to mess with. We fed goats, slid down slides, and saw all kinds of cool animals there, although by that time we were getting pretty tired.
We saw lemurs and rhinos and tigers, and we even went inside a giant butterfly house where, if you were lucky, butterflies would land right on you. We rode the bug carousel and avoided the 10 mile long line to meet Yo Gabba Gabba. By the afternoon we could barely walk or form cohesive sentences, and we hadn’t even seen half of the zoo! I must say that we should get parental bonus points for perfectly timing the length of our stay. The tigers were our last stop, and the whining only really started around that time, and as we walked from the tigers to the exit, Edward fell asleep in the stroller. Parenting Win!
After the zoo we went home to nap for an hour and then spent the evening on the roof of my agent’s building looking out at the skyline. A wonderful way to spend a birthday. Starah even made us dinner and we talked about singing and birthdays and kids and life as my children slowly destroyed her apartment. She didn’t mind though, and as we left Starah to clean the rocks up off of her floor (don’t ask), we all agreed that it had been a great day, and as I sat at home and read the 150 facebook posts on my timeline, I felt sure that I had just experienced one of my best birthdays ever.