After a family visit in the morning, we headed to Washington D.C. Instead of dealing with city traffic, we parked at the Shady Grove metro stop and took the metro into town. We got off at Cleveland Street and walked along a wide sidewalk lined with interesting stores and restaurants, crossed a bridge overlooking a park, to the entrance of the zoo.
Entry to the Smithsonian National Zoological park is free, but you need a reservation which you can make online. If you drive in, you will also need to reserve a parking pass, which is $30. Parking at the metro station was free on the weekends, metro tickets for the two of us roundtrip were $14 (and more convenient for our travel).
Due to our family visit we got there at 1 PM. Signs everywhere said that pandas were coming (but not there yet). The layout was a little confusing and maps did not indicate precisely where the animals were, which led to backtracking. We walked the asian trail and saw small clawed otters and asian elephants. We went through a beautiful aviary building. The zoo is on a hill- the entrance we came in was at the top of the hill, and the other entrance is on the bottom. It would probably be better for us to have walked down the bottom and worked our way up while we had the most energy. The weather was nice- warm but not overly hot, overcast but not raining. We kept hydrated and just had snacks we brought with us.
We went to “Lemur Island” and it was very disappointing. There was a beautiful waterfall on a steep hill surrounded by a moat, and you could walk all around the enclosure, but none of the lemurs listed on the sign were in sight, even for my eagle-eyed lemur expert. She scowled at the hill, deciding it would be hard to work there putting out enrichment and keeping it clean. We went to the many buildings (small mammals, apes, reptiles, amazonian) which were impressive and interesting. Armadillos, I think my favorite thing in the buildings was seeing a family of meerkats. We saw a keeper target training a Galapagos tortoise. Target training is done to coax animals into doing things, usually so that they can be moved or medicated. I also saw a beaver dragging a stick from one end of his huge enclosure to the dam he was building. We had to skip the great cats trail because we were running out of time, but did get to see a tiger. We closed out the park. A police car was driving up and down the main path, announcing on loudspeakers it was time to go, all exhibits closed. We slogged back up the hill.
On the way back to the metro we were going to stop for dinner, but couldn’t decide until we actually reached the entrance that we had really wanted the first restaurant we saw. We were too exhausted to go back, so instead stopped at a weird little subterranean Target and got snack dinner. We got the train back to our car, and by the time we got there it had started raining. Driving was scary for a while without having AC to de-fog our windshield. We had a special windshield cleaner for the inside and that helped. A quick stop at BK to refuel and then we drove on to Philadelphia and got a motel for the night.
