Since we are members of FONZ, we get some pretty sweet perks.  The annual membership, to me, is worth the ‘free’ parking when we go to the zoo.  So Saturday night, we camped at the zoo.  You read that right.  Tent, us, zoo, all at once.

It’s not like there are more reasons needed to want to camp at the zoo besides, you know, camping at the freakin’ zoo. But somehow it does get better. We selected the Cheetah Conservation option and it did not disappoint. We got to meet the Cheetahs. Not super up close, like we haven’t touched cheetah, but we were verrrrrrrrrrrry close. Of particular interest was Bacari. He was so obsessed with Thurston that he followed us around. This made for an extra incredible experience.

We saw other animals during our tour, including the Grevy’s zebras, damas, gazelles, and some super cool vultures — at feeding time, no less, so we got to watch a vulture pull the innards of a rat, well, out.

Other things we did:

We got to walk through whale invertebrate. Unfortunately this is a sculpture made entirely of trash recovered from one beach in Oregon (there were 17 or 18 assorted sculptures throughout the zoo). It’s cool what she did; just sad how she got her materials.

We got to see the tiger clean his paws at night.

A lion was our alarm clock.

Cutey boy catching the big cats.

The gorillas are quite active at 8am. This one was picking his nose and then seeing what came out.

And we got to watch the pandas tussle.  They were so dang adorable.

So happy to have the chance to celebrate Thurston’s 6th birthday with such a memorable gift.