the Bronx zoo

My parents recently moved from Idaho to New York City, of all the crazy places, to do family history archive work for our church. They were assigned to an archive in Queens and got there to start working in March. They've already been up to visit us once, for Easter, and it was our turn to go to them. While we were at it, we got a membership to the Bronx Zoo ... which, I didn't know at first, is also a membership to the Queens Zoo, the Central Park Zoo, the Prospect Park Zoo, and the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. And free parking at Bronx and the aquarium - that alone is worth the cost of the membership.

This is a very large zoo with A LOT of walking. I wouldn't recommend going when it's hot, because the buildings didn't appear to have any kind of cooling system at all. Carry a lot of water and refill every chance you get. At one point, AC left me sitting on a bench under a tree with the girls while he went (what seemed like) halfway across the zoo to get to the nearest water fountain. The girls want to go again but we're going to wait until the fall when it's a lot cooler outside.

This huge statue of a rhinoceros is outside one of the original buildings of the zoo dating back to the 1890s. I don't know what was in it before (probably the rhinoceros and maybe an elephant), but it currently has lizards there.

The Children's Zoo is fairly small - apparently it's being renovated right now and will reopen a larger section soon. We were still able to visit the alpacas ...

... and pet the sheep and goats.

Posy was completely absorbed in watching the little penguins.

Dad is 5-foot-10. He's not as tall as a tiger. Good thing for this big photo chart. In this part of the zoo, the tiger was hiding and we didn't see it. We saw a different tiger later in the day.

The baby baboon!! We saw the baby baboon!

This was MY favorite part of the zoo - the Wild Asia Monorail, where we SIT for about 15 minutes and see a whole bunch of animals in large, natural enclosures. We did this at the end of our visit, when everyone was happy to sit for awhile.

Our membership includes free rides on the carousel, which we rode 3 times in a row. This little monkey wanted to keep going and was very upset when we couldn't go anymore because it was closing for the day.

Azalea wasn't quite sure what to make of the carousel. Apparently, we've not taken her on one often enough.

Coming out of the butterfly garden, we had some fun photo ops!

Our new favorite insect - the midge fly - because this little guy is what pollinates cocoa plants! We recently read a book about how chocolate is made from cocoa and it featured the midge fly, so the girls were very excited to come across this model at the butterfly garden.