St. Louis Zoo

One great thing about St. Louis is that there are several fun things to do with kids that are free.  One is the zoo.  The kids had a day off school last week so we gave the zoo a try.  The weather was great, mid to high 60s and the zoo was not crowded at all.  Hooray!  Plus its free!!!  And the zoo was really nice and had lots of cool animals to see.  Here we are at the entrance.

 

 Going into the zoo.  We got a super close parking spot because it was so empty.

It's the little things.

I can't even remember what we were looking at here.  I think it was a rhino.  But I like how John was getting all excited about it.  If the animals are hard to see, sometimes its hard to get the little ones to see them.  Luckily most of them were front and center, including our rhino friend.  So John got to see lots of animals.

 There's our rhino

The kids looking at a model of a snakes nest.  This nest was part of a big log for kids to climb through and Anna kept insisting that I crawl through it too.  So I did.  It was not big person sized, but I didn't get stuck in there, so hooray for that.

 Grant and Matthew found a nook to sit in

 And a snake statue

 Elephant.  We got better views of the elephant, but not better pictures

A giant beetle.  Zoo statues are the best.  They also had a beetle quilt inside the bug exhibit. 

There was a butterfly dome too and the kids were brave and went in there with the butterflies.  Read about a bad butterfly encounter HERE.

 Ok, now its just starting to feel like we didn't see any actual animals at this zoo.  But we did.  And we got to see a lot of them close up too!  But here's another statue.  ;)

Giraffes.  We saw an ostrich chase some of the giraffes around. Bully.  There were also a lot of great fall colors to see there.  So we had a great time.  Grant really liked seeing the grizzly bear take a "bath" (he was sitting in a pool of water).  I liked seeing the big cats.  There were so many of them.  We saw lions, tigers, mountain lions, panthers, jaguars, a snow leopard and a cheetah.  I think there were even some other big cats, but I can't remember.  I also liked seeing the Okapi, which I have read about in a few books but never seen.
So, the St. Louis Zoo is a wonderful zoo.  And free.  We'll be back...we just need to find days, like this one, when its not too hot, cold or crowded.