Date to the Dallas Zoo

Valentine's Day came and went for us. We were both working, and eventually saw each other at night for a special romantic Pizza Hut dinner (ha) and a movie we rented that I fell asleep through about 20 minutes in (I'm like 1.5 days into being sick at this point).

We wake up on the 15th (still sick with some kind of cold that's being a complete ass) and we take our time to actually get out of bed. It's a lazy morning for us, but when we eventually got up we were dressed and fed in under thirty minutes.

We had discussed going to the Dallas Zoo for our makeup "Valentine's Day" date on the 15th a week before, and agreed it would be something different and fun to do. Robert had never been, and I hadn't been in maybe two or three years.

Let me just start off by saying that the Dallas Zoo is a lot more active, family-friendly, and overall a lot more fun than the Fort Worth Zoo. There really is no comparison anymore, and I know we'll be going to the Dallas Zoo a lot more in our future.

The Dallas Zoo has two set ticket seasons, and luckily we are in the season where the tickets are cheap (at $7 which is $7 less than the Fort Worth Zoo). Dallas Zoo parking is also $8 which is $3 bucks more than the Fort Worth Zoo, but at the time we got there (about an hour after they had opened) not many people were there. We got to park right up at the front gate.

Now this trip for us was going to be different because Robert's dad, Robert (yes yes, both named Robert), told my Robert to bring a camera for me this time. For whatever reason I might have the gift of a god photography running in my veins. So I got suited up with a Canon 70D!

 The first animals we came across were the Lemurs and they were all out and about sunbathing, and it made a great way to test out the camera and get it focused/shoot ready/understandable. After the Lemurs we somehow managed to find the kids section (ha, who would've thought with me in charge) and we went into a bird cage area thingy where you could feed the parrots. We'll we didn't feed them, but we did get some fantastic shots with our cameras and our camera phones. 

Robert apparently has a thing for birds. Here are only a few examples of what I've talking about...

I'm telling y'all he loves birds.

He asked me later at night what type of parrot (the green one) we held at the Zoo today was called. Then we went onto Google to look at the lifespan of said parrots. I swear to god if I come home to a parrot one day I'm going to get a cat, and that cat will be a bird parrot hunter.

After we moved on from the birds we saw a 20 pound bunny, two baby cows, a large koi fish pond, some goats, a sheep, and some duckies. Why are the kids sections always better?

(This is me trying to be a real photographer in the kids section.. looking at ducks)

MOVING ON...

We eventually got out of the kids section, and found the otters, birds of prey, large mammals, an ant eater, and you guessed it - MORE PARROTS!

^ naked mole rats^

After I convinced Robert to stop taking more pictures (he took like 800 photos on this date) we headed over to the other side of the zoo called Wilds of Africa. Wilds of Africa host the penguins, lions, cheetahs, elephants, giraffes, zebras, fucking evil birds ostriches, gorillas, chimpanzees, etc. 

I think we came out on a good day because most animals were out AND actually active. They weren't really pacing back and forth like you see at the Fort Worth Zoo. Now I will say the momma elephant and baby weren't out on display but that didn't really dampen our spirits. To be honest I didn't really know they had a new baby elephant so it kinda just worked out on it's own.

I think the thing I looked forward to the most at this zoo was being able to feed the Giraffes and I actually got to feed them this time! *insert high pitch girl squeal* It was fantastic. Robert said I fed the Giraffes to fast since he wasn't able to get any good photos, but they were obviously hungry and I was doing my civil duty of feeding these big babies. 

Robert had a strange connection with the oldest Giraffe that was in the feeding ring they had at the zoo. I mean the Giraffe came up to him after our feeding session and let him touch his nose AND we weren't even at the feeding station anymore. We were on a bridge to go view other animals. Robert is officially the Giraffe whisperer because he spent a good ten minutes with the older Giraffe.

The old man Giraffe was very sweet though, and he was so handsome. 

  

We eventually made it out of the Giants of the Savannah exhibit and made our way over to the monkeys, alligators/crocodiles, meerkats, and of course more birds. We didn't really see very many monkeys or Gorillas, and when we finally found the Gorillas two males were having a space dominance yard fight, and at least gave us a little bit of a show. 

Other than that we finished up the zoo by walking by their new construction project that's going to feature Hippos and we decided that we'd come back for that. It looks like the new exhibit is going to be HUGE and full of a lot of new things to see/do. 

We had a fantastic time (spent 3 hours), and we both agreed that we'd be back in the future to see the animals again. Also I just want to note that most of the animals/exhibits had signs on them stating that these animals were under Veterinary care at that moment so some of them weren't out on exhibit. We can't wait to go back, when the Vet isn't around, and see the animals we weren't able to this time.