Another Day, Another Zoo: Kansas City Zoo

Without really planning it, we will be going to four zoos within a week. When we decided to go up to KC this week, I wanted to do something fun for the kids to kind of make up for the eight-hour trip (each way). Lori and Lani tagged along with us, and the girls had a lot of fun together.

Before we headed to the zoo, we met Uncle Jim for breakfast at IHOP.

I had been on a quest to take Mara to a zoo with a polar bear ever since we went to the Tulsa Zoo a couple of years ago to find out that its polar bear had died only six months earlier. I discovered that the closest zoos to us with polar bears were Memphis, Albuquerque, and Kansas City. That meant that we finally got to see a polar bear with our trip to the zoo today. The exhibit was pretty much the first thing after you walked through the gates, and he was out doing his "exercises." He was swimming around in circles, periodically surfacing and jumping back into the water backward.

Up close and personal with the kids.

Here is a series of the bear coming up and pushing off the glass right in front of the kids.

Check out how big his paws are!

A cute little red panda

Each time we go to a zoo, Mara asks if there are any babies there. We found a "baby" orangutan at this one. She is two years old and loved to play with her blanket. (There's more information on her interesting history here.)

The current tiger enclosure was neat because you could look at them from two different sides. You can even see Diane, John, and the kids on the other side in a couple of these pictures.

Despite being blurry, I really like this picture of Mara and me.

Just as with the other zoos, Jack ended up passing out about halfway through our visit, right before we got to the baby baboon.

All of the kids got to ride the carousel. Of course Mara picked the giraffe, which we didn't get to see on this trip to the zoo.

As we were leaving, we finally caught a glimpse of the polar bear outside of the water.

I think everyone was glad we came to the zoo. They're going to be making a lot of improvements to this zoo over the next five years, so we'll definitely come back to see how it changes.