I took my daughter and my niece to the Indianapolis Zoo.
Why the zoo? Because one of the summer food stands in the zoo is a Dog n Suds. More on that in another post.
The zoo was expensive — $14 each to get in and another $5 per car to park. And there wasn’t much to it. We were sorry to see that we had just missed Elephant Awareness Week, but before the day was over, we became aware of three or four of them.
To see the few animals, we had to fight through throngs of kids on day camp field trips and find our way around merry-go-rounds and roller coasters. It wasn’t until we got to the marine animal area that we saw anything very impressive. They had an underwater dome in the dolphin tank. We hung around there for a while and saw the dolphins jump a couple times.
This was funny. There were several sea lions and seals in the same tank. We were watching through the underwater window as they swam their laps in a figure-eight pattern. One of the seals was heading across when a sea lion swam right in front of it. The seal bumped right into the larger animal. The photo below is another near-collision that took place a couple minutes later. In this case, the seal just had to suddenly veer up to avoid the sea lion.
The penguin room had a see-through floor through which we could watch them swimming back and forth. One exhibit that sounded a lot more exciting than it turned out to be was the shark-touch pool. About 50 small sand sharks were cruising back and forth in a shallow tank. I bent over to touch one and promptly dipped my camera case in the water. My camera wasn’t in it at the time. The shark felt slimy.
Next to but separate from the zoo (but part of the zoo admission fee) was a butterfly conservatory. There were hundreds of exotic butterflies flitting around, and we took our time enjoying and photographing them, but none of them landed on us.
