We went downstairs and checked out and took our stuff to the Escape. Our first stop was Kerry Park on Queen Anne because mom has never been there and really wanted to go there. I plugged the coords into the Nuvi and up the hill we went. Last time I was here was on May Day 2012 when I rode up with Bob and Bev to visit Groundspeak. We came here first to get the caches and to eat our lunch. We could see the helicopters flying around anticipating the mob of people ready to break windows and cause chaos. This time, our view had no helicopters and there wasn't that many people around. Mom was surprised and disappointed of the size of the park. She expected a larger park. I told her it wasn't for the park but the view of Seattle from up here. She did enjoy the view and we took several pictures from up here.
I even had her do the virtual, Kerry Viewpoint Park (GC62C8), up here before we left.
We drove down the hill and across the bridge into Fremont. We wanted to go see JP Patches and Gertrude since it recently turned into a virtual cache, Late for the Interurban (GC7B9AY). I haven't been to Groundspeak in a few years. We found a place to park and walked across the street to get our photo.
Erika decided to stay in the Escape and watch us. We answered the questions, found the trackable bricks and ran back across the street. Mom watched this show as a kid and it makes her happy when she can come visit.
We drove down 34th Street onto North Northlake Way and pulled into the parking lot of Gas Works Park. Erika said she had never been here before. I thought she had been here before. I wanted to do the virtual here while we explored.
HQGT: Gas Works Park (GC7B665) took us all over the park to gather information from two locations.
We goofed around a bit while we worked on the information. For being a not so great day and the threat of rain there were quite a few people out wandering around the park.
We took our necessary pictures to finish the virtual and then walked back to the Escape.
It was almost lunch time so we drove up the hill to Dick's Drive-In on 45th Street since it was on the way to Woodland Park Zoo. We each got a few burgers, some fries and a shake.
I got a strawberry shake. Mom ended up dropping hers on the ground so they gave us a new one. I know, we can't take her anywhere. We sat in the Escape and ate our food. There were some strange people wandering around the area.
I typed in the address into Nuvi so she could take us the most efficient way to the Woodland Park Zoo. We got there around noon. We parked in the hippo lot for $6. We made sure we had everything we needed and paid only $18 to get into the zoo because of Erika's $4 military discount. She turns to mom and says, I see why you wanted me to come. You wanted to use me for my military discount. We all just laughed because some of it was true but I think mom wanted to have a daughter weekend. We presented our tickets to the admissions girl and headed on in. We stopped by the souvenir store to see what kinds of stuff they had. Mom looked at the sloth stuff while I looked at the penguin stuffed animals. I got a few postcards, a magnet, a stuffed penguin all in a small reusable bag. My penguin is adorable.
We looked at our map to see the route how efficient we could be. We got here too late to feed the penguins and I was bummed out. There is always another time we can come up here and do that. We don't live that far away. We started out with the African Savanna and saw things like the lions, the zebras, hippos, giraffes, warthogs and some of the African birds.
Mom and Erika saw the other souvenir store and went inside there to see if they had anything different while I visited with the penguins.
We moved on to the Northern Trail section where they had mountain goats, elk, bears, wolves and otters. We found out one of the otters had some babies and you could view them on a webcam. They were adorable.
Our next stop was across the walkway to Australasia. There, we saw the emus, kangaroos, we got to see all the cockatoos and parakeets.
We walked over to the Trail of Vines (Tropical Asia) where we saw the rhinos (who were taking a bath) the orangutans, lemurs and other various native birds.
We walked back across the pathway into the Banyan Wilds where we saw the tigers, the sloth bears, several different kinds of birds (who made a lot of noise) and some more otters.
Our last section of the zoo was the Temperate Forest. We had to go see the red pandas (since this was the last weekend they were going to be at this zoo and the reason why mom wanted to come here), the foxes, the various birds, the bug room and the barn yard animals.
Near the red panda exhibit was a cache called World's Smallest (GC4J2H4) which was nearby the Pudu's. They were the world's smallest deer and they lived in the Chilean Andes. I found it quickly and wrote my name down as fast as I could before someone walked by wondering what I was doing.
Since we've seen all of the zoo and we walked about 7 miles we figured it was time to go. We got back to the hippo lot and plugged our home coordinates into the Nuvi.
I had no idea how to get back to I-5 from here but once I was on I-5 I didn't need the GPS anymore. I highly considered stopping at UW to get the virtual cache inside of the library but the traffic was iffy, it had started raining, there was some construction near one of the visitor's lots and it was parent's weekend. We did look into it before we came up here for the weekend.
We got home around 6ish and mom headed back into Rainier after we helped her put stuff in the Expedition. We told her that we had fun and we should look into doing another outing somewhere. She said she had plenty of places to go hiking once the weather started getting nicer.
Next Adventure: Hands Across the Border Event, Peace Arch, Bellingham, WWU and a stop in Mount Vernon
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