St Louis Zoo

Yesterday my friends and I got in the car for a road trip to St Louis, MO. My friend is up from Florida to visit her brand new granddaughter so we came down to visit her. The drive down wasn’t too bad at all, only 4.5 hours from where we are outside of Chicago. We got down to St. Louis and settled into our hotel, had lunch at Jack-in-the-Box (blech) and then went to the St Louis Zoo with our friends.

I love that this is a free zoo and as long as you can find street parking, you don’t have to pay the $15 to park. This would be awesome to have close to me. I would love to just pack up a lunch and sit in front of the animals and watch them. (We have Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, but seeing that I’m not in the city, it doesn’t work for me.)

Our first stop was the Monsanto Insectarium. I was a little surprised that it was sponsored by Monsanto, but who knows bugs better than those that try to kill them, right? It was a great exhibit, though. You were able to get up close to a ton of bugs you’ll probably never see.  The boys loved it and Monkey kept asking to go see the giraffes.

On your way out of the insectarium is a beautiful butterfly garden. It was so cool to be able to get really close to all these beautiful butterflies. You can see the kids were having a great time taking pictures of them all. The funny thing is that Monkey absolutely loved this part while the boys would flinch every time a butterfly would fly near them.

Next we took the hippo trail and saw a lot of cool animals. I loved that you felt like you were right in the exhibits with the animals. My friend asked me if I had a good zoom lens on my camera for these pics. No, I didn’t, I just used the kit lens and cropped some of the stuff out from around the animals.

The only part I was disappointed in was the large cat exhibits. All the enclosures were on hills so it made it hard to see the cats. I’m sure the cats are happier in those exhibits, but my favorite animals to see are the cats. Monkey was very happy to finally find her giraffe.

The orangutans were one of Buddy’s favorite exhibits. I could sit there and watch them for hours. They had paper bags and scraps of cloth that they could play with and they did! They were so fun to watch. The one kept picking up scraps of items and putting them in the bag. It is just amazing to watch them do such human like things.

The penguins were our last stop at the zoo and another of Buddy’s favorites. That puffin down at the bottom corner kept swimming back and forth splashing families until Buddy went by him. Then he just kept calmly swimming back and forth from a rock and up to Buddy. He said the puffin really liked him. He definitely wanted to put on a show. The penguin exhibit was nice and cool and a perfect way to cool off after a long, hot day walking around at the zoo. They are another animal I could just sit and watch for hours.

Overall the kids really had a great time. There was a point that Buddy really wanted to leave but he’s not a huge zoo fan to begin with. (He can’t be my kid!) I think the biggest problem was that we were all overdressed with long pants and long sleeves. It was 77 out during the day and in the zoo we weren’t getting the wind that was plaguing us all day. We were quite warm. I definitely suggest hitting the St Louis Zoo if you are in town, though. I know we’ll go again next time we are here.

Note: I was not compensated in any way, nor asked to post about the St Louis Zoo. I just wanted to share our family adventures with you.