Jacksonville Zoo Trip

Along with my annual trip home to Jacksonville for Christmas come our annual trip to the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens with my niece and nephew. I always look forward to this and dread the day they become too old for this. Hopefully, I'll have my own kids by then.

Now, in my opinion, I think the JAX Zoo is one of the best in the nation. Granted, I've never been to the infamous San Diego Zoo, but compared to some of the zoos I've been too, it rocks! It Definitely blows the Indy Zoo out of the water. I think a lot of that has to do with space, though... the JAX Zoo has a lot of land to work with! But I'm probably a little biased, too, since this is where I go with my niece and nephew all the time.

It seems no matter how hard we try, we can never get out of the house as early as we want to. This always leads us to rushing at the end of the day to see everything we want, but we know to catch the exhibits we want as early as possible. One of our favorites is always the Lorikeets. We always want to catch them early when they're still hungry. But this year we had a new exhibit to catch - a baby leopard! He was SO adorable at only 4 months old! Sadly, he can't go in the cage with his mother, so he'll likely be sent to another zoo when he's old enough, but he was fun to see, none the less.

The kids always love the Great Ape loop, too, though if the weather is too cool, there's not as much action. That really goes for all of the animals, just about... if they're even out, they seem to just be trying to capture warmth from the sunlight. Except for the penguins... they seemed to be loving the weather! Darian managed to be the last one to feed one of the giraffes today, as well... did you know they can eat up to 1% of their body weight, which can be more that 20 lbs of food a day??!!

So all in all, we had another wonderful trip to the zoo. I really think this is such a fun tradition to have - there's not too many zoos you can go to between Christmas an New Year's. So all in all, another great end to a great trip home for the holidays.