The National Zoo

Uncle Brandon is currently completing an intership in Washington D.C. as part of his Master's degree program, so while we were in Delaware last week we made a day trip to D.C. to visit him on his "home turf".  Since we weren't meeting up with him until early afternoon, we decided to pass our morning at the National Zoo.  This zoo is run by the Smithsonian Institute and is free (my preferred price range).  This was an excellent zoo.  The exhibits were large- probably the largest I've ever seen in a zoo, and there was a wide variety of animals.  Brian and I commented several times that they had animals at this zoo that we'd never seen before.  The premier exhibit at the zoo was the Giant Panda exhibit.  The National Zoo is one of only four zoos in the U.S. that has Pandas, so there were lots of people at this exhibit .  We enjoyed many different areas of the park- including the Great Ape and Large Cat exhibits.  I don't know why, but the kids always love the reptile house, so spent quite a bit of time here.  I really liked the way that the zoo was organized because anmials were grouped by their similarity to each other (birds, small mammals, large cats, etc...) and not by where they are found geographically. Here are some pictures from the zoo.