San Diego Zoo

If you've seen my Facebook or Twitter updates, I'm sure you'd know by now that our road trip to Sequoia National Park was a complete failure. I can't really explain exactly what happened (at least not in technical terms), but on Monday morning, something in Luke's car broke while he was changing the oil, causing tons of oil to squirt out all over him and his parking space. Yikes. He did end up fixing the problem, but we didn't want to risk having to get towed all the way from Fresno, nor did we want to have to drive my gas-guzzling SUV. Luckily, we were able to cancel our hotel reservations. I'm not going to lie; we were pretty disappointed that we had to cancel our trip. However, we didn't let this little hiccup ruin our week. We simply took another look at our "Places to Go" list and decided to take a second trip down to San Diego the next day. This time, we spent the afternoon at the zoo.

We couldn't have picked a more perfect day to visit the zoo. San Diego always has perfect weather. It was a warm but not too warm 75 degrees and sunny. I did remember to wear comfortable clothes and shoes for the day, but I completely forgot to apply sunscreen. The result? I am now sporting a mild sunburn. Oops.

How adorable is this panda? There was a really long line just to get into the panda exhibit, but it was worth it. I could have spent hours watching this guy nom nom nom on his bamboo.

This huge grizzly bear reminded me of my own humongous teddy bear, Bubba. Are you sensing a pattern? Three out of six of my animal pictures are of bears, my favorite animals. :)

Did you know that the San Diego Zoo also has a petting zoo with farm animals? Since Luke and I didn't get a chance to go to the Orange County Fair this past summer, I jumped at the chance to visit the sheep and goats. This cute little guy was following me around the pen.

After hours of uphill walking around the zoo, Luke and I were STARVING. Yes, I know that all that walking was a good workout. And yes, I know that eating a huge BBQ pulled pork sandwich completely undid all of that hard work. And no, I did not feel guilty afterwards. (I probably should have, but this sandwich was literally too delicious for me to care about calories!) This was just our second visit, but Phil's BBQ has become one my favorite parts of San Diego.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention this: we drove past the San Diego Natural History Museum on our way to the zoo. We've added the museum to our list of places to go in the future. :)