Ari at the Zoo
Sep 21st, 2006 by Brian A. Thomas
Tuesday, Sara was going to go to Niagara Falls with a friend, her daughter and Ari. (Well her original plan was to see the Dali Lama, and while her name was drawn for second chance tickets, she was unable to go pick them up in person a week before the event, so there went that idea.) I told Sara over the weekend that if they couldn’t go together, I would see if I could take Tuesday off to take them. Ari loved the waterfall at the garden exhibit, so he might have had some enjoyment at the Falls. Well, something happened and I ended up having to take a personal day.
Unfortunately, things were not planned well enough, so that when we finally got on the road, it was a bit late and neither of us really felt like driving all the way to the Falls. In the end this was a good thing, but more on that later. So we decided to go the Cleveland Zoo, figuring Ari would have a really good time seeing all the animals.
Ari did enjoy the animals, but I think he enjoyed seeing the waterfalls there more. I think his favorite part was the lights in the wood posts just below eye level for him. Next time I guess we’ll do COSI, which he probably would enjoy. (First we might do the science like museum at the McKinley Presidential Library & Museum, although Ari is too young for the planetarium). In hindsight, he probably would have enjoyed the Falls just as much.
By the time we got home however, I had a bad migraine. It was probably just as well that I wasn’t at work, since I would have left early anyhow, making it harder them to plan around it if at all. The florescent lights probably would have made the migraine worse.
We took some pictures, but not too many. I’ll post them online soonish.
It was an okay visit, but they closed at 5PM that day, which meant it was an overly short visit for a big zoo like that. The Rain forest section itself would have taken an hour or more to see properly, as it was we rushed through it, and didn’t hit a few major sections of the zoo itself. If we had an extra two hours or so it probably would have worked out well, except of course I would have been in major pain at the end of the visit and Sara would have been driving us home.
