A couple weeks ago, my oldest friend – who I met in elementary school – visited Chicago for a conference, and followed that with a visit out here in the suburbs. On one of the days she was visited, we decided on the nearby Phillips Park Zoo for an afternoon walk, strolling around in delightful weather, with only the minor lament that the zoo’s alligators outgrew their space and have moved to another zoo.
In discussions that evening at to what we could do the next day, which would include dropping her at one of the Chicago airports early evening, we decided to introduce her to Brookfield Zoo, one of the two large zoos in the Chicagoland area (the other being Lincoln Park Zoo). The lovely weather continued, and we were able to view the new outdoor primate habitats in the Bramsen Tropical Forest, including the delightful experience of watching several monkeys chasing a squirrel that was traversing the netting of their enclosure on the outside. (Delightful for us, that is. I’m not sure how the squirrel felt.)
A week after dropping her off at the airport, we flew to Washington, DC, dropped our luggage at the hotel for the conference I was attending, and beelined to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Alas, we ran out of energy before we saw the pandas. Like many larger zoos, it may be possible to see all of the animals in a day if you arrive at the beginning of the day, but we arrived at lunch time after an early morning and eventually called it quits. Hopefully we’ll make it back there in the near future to see what we missed and revisit the many animals we enjoyed seeing this time around.