Day 6: Already?

Sometimes you look forward to something and then it finally happens and you somewhat slightly panic. That was how it was today. I have been reading Geekgirl's blog for months now and she is very real. Not fake at all. I wanted to not sound like a stalker, or some idiot off the street. I thinks things went really well. She is a talker, so that helped a lot. I really enjoyed getting to talk to her and her husband Baboo. He had just biked 60 miles and ran 2 miles that day. He said "He ONLY biked 60 miles..." ONLY???
We all met at a 50's joint called Hurricanes, good food and GREAT prices!
We woke up and headed to the Rio Grande Zoo/Botanical Gardens/Aquarium. They have a train that runs between the three. We were able to get half price admission for being a bowler. That really helped us out.
We took a train the aquarium, where we were able to see some very interesting crabs, jellyfish, eels, and sharks. And lots of other sea animals...


We had to get back to the Zoo, so we could meet Geekgirl and Baboo for lunch, so we left and then came back. Zeb loves Zebra's, because of his name. ZEBra's.
We also got to see some unhappy polar bears, a noisy lion, mice that liked to hang out in various animal habitats, beautiful jaguar's, cheetah and cougar's, mountain lion that was panting pretty hard, a Bengal tiger that was napping on his back up on a ledge (so cute!), Rhino's, hippo's, monkey's, ape's and baboo's. One was a real character, he was trying to get us gawkers to give him stuff, and he would do motions to get more attention. (i.e. wiped his brow, held out his arms and made motions) Oh yeah, and we saw some kangaroo's, peacock's wandering the grounds, and some elephants fight for a ball and push each other off a mound of dirt. (We were told they were the 10 year old boys) Go figure...

We saw some neat duck's too. Wood and Mallard ducks. Also one we don't know what it was. We saw some Bald and a Golden Eagle (in picture), REALLY UP CLOSE! We were probably 5 feet away from us. It was right in front of us. I don't think any of the birds were really more than 15 feet away.

A lot of the animals were really up close. This one is the New Mexico state bird. The Roadrunner. Doesn't exactly look like the cartoon....

It was a fun day, but Zeb wanted to be like Dad so he wore shorts and a T-shirt and didn't think to bring a sweatshirt. It was a bit cool this morning and so we ended up letting him use my jacket until we could buy him a sweatshirt to wear.

Between the Zoo and Aquarium is some ponds for fishing for Trout and catfish. Also, a pond for running remote control boats! How cool is that! We could have stopped by we didn't have time. It was a busy and fun day, we headed back to the hotel for a nap before doing anything else.

Today's Temp got up to 67 degrees.
Tomorrow we are going back to Bandilier National Monument to finish some of the walks, and we promised the kids some swimming time.