We had a wonderful day! The drive was beautiful and the weather was perfect. The zoo is several miles outside of the actual city, so there was plenty of wildlife, other than the zoo animals. Because the Hogle Zoo in Utah is the only other zoo we have been too this is our comparison. It was a lot bigger. There was so much space. The NC Zoo has two main sections, North America and Africa. We had to take a shuttle to get to from North America to Africa. There was so much more space for the animals. We both really liked how all of the African plane animals we all in the same area. It was wide and really felt like we were on an African safari. Even though the elephants were listed in this one specific area on the map it did not mean that they would be there. They could have been on the opposite side of the plane with the antelope. Ryan and I never felt like the animals were cooped up and constrained as they are in the Hogle Zoo. The giraffes and zebras had plenty of space. The lions even had their own habitat rather than a spacious cage.
One thing we did not enjoy as much as the Hogle Zoo however was the variety of animals. We both felt that although Hogle Zoo is smaller in space and the animals did not have as much space, there was a greater variety and more animals to see.
However, the best part was the effort the NC Zoo went to create the actual habitat for the animals it housed. There were pine trees by the grizzly bear and tall grass for the elephants, antelope and rhinos. There were even termite mounds, though Ryan and I believe them to be models. In Ryan’s words “it looked the part.”
My favorite part of the trip was the aviary. When we walked inside, it felt has if we had been transported to a tropical island it was so hot and humid. The inside was filled with tropical plants and flowers I have never seen. It took us a good five minutes of walking around before we saw a single bird, but then there was plenty to be had. There were parrots, mice birds, scarlet ibises, and many more I don’t know the names of. We met an elderly couple while in there who worked for the Chicago Zoo in the aviary. They spent several minutes with us pointing out the birds that most viewers missed and told us several interesting facts. As we went through the zoo we found Ryan’s relatives, though they were sleeping out of sight at the time.
I wonder if they are more his relatives or mine because Ryan never sleeps and the gorillas always sleep.
A little further on Ryan believes we found my relatives.
As we reached the African plane animals though, tragedy struck. Our camera mysteriously stopped working. We didn’t drop it and no water got on it, but it seemed like the camera couldn’t take pictures. We could see all of the pictures we had taken earlier but every time we took a picture after the camera broke, looked black. The screen was black when we took the picture and the screen was black when we viewed the picture, but we could still physically take a picture. It was the weirdest thing. I was extremely sad about the camera breaking and tried everything I could to fix it.
This past Friday Ryan and I took the camera into a Best Buy to see if they had any suggestions or see what it would take to get fixed. They told us that it seemed like something in the shutter broke so the camera was not getting any light. If this was the case it would cost more to fix the camera than to buy a new one. I felt sick. Nothing had drastically happened to it and now we were going to have to buy a new one. I was not a happy camper.
Today as I was prepping to write this blog, I had Ryan go get the camera so I could download the pictures. I took one picture to show the black screen. When I took the picture the screen was black, but then miraculously the screen became light and the picture showed up for a brief second or two. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I flipped the switch to view and there it was, Ryan standing in our kitchen. So although our camera is not all the way healed or fixed, we can at least take and view pictures. Hooray!
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