Vacation 2014 Post 3 - Como Park, the 2nd time around...

Here we go with the third post from our summer vacation... the one we started back in late June and finished early July. I'm getting a little more settled in to the new job and schedule so I find a bit of time to post here and there. 

That's my excuse anyway... 

 So in this post, my varmints, Larger American Boy and Smaller Chinese Boy, and myself find our family unit minus 1 at the Como Park Zoo in Minneapolis. A delightful place and park that is mostly free, as you can see from my first post, and we went back a second day to find the zoo that we were actually very close to but didn't know it on the first day.

So as we parked and walked in, we find some volunteers with various creepy-crawly thing-a-ma-bobs in their hands and around their necks.

Here's the backs of the heads of both boys looking at two nasty ol' snakes they had on display.  Why anyone would want to look at such a thing is beyond me...

This was a little better.  It's a giraffe skull and tiny model of the trees that the very same beast eats from.  The girl in the picture gives some info on the subject at hand and then turns it around for the boys to ask questions.  Very cool.

This also had various degrees of nastiness about it. Frogs and other such gross creatures.  The boys were beginning to lose interest at this point and that was fine by dear ol' dad!!!

That's a big ol' gorilla sitting up against the glass.  He sat there for quite a while and was generally unimpressed that folks like me were there looking at him and trying to photograph him.

Caleb's hand on the polar bear model.

Robbys hand on the polar bear model.

And my hand on the same.  

This was a shot of the boys trying to find a similar polar bear as to the track models above.  We found the big beast, but he was napping in a very hard to find doorway.

We ran across a dad entering with his kids as we were walking out so we traded photo ops.  We didn't go into the botanical side of the zoo (behind us), but I bet it was just as impressive.

A wide shot of the whole building.  Free building associated with the free zoo!

I only mention that because in this day and age, when you can't go to the grocery store for the week and spend less than $200, it's impressive to me that anything can be "free".  This was a great example of a very impressive FREE!