Katrina's Travels

November 17 was my last full day with my relatives in Lacey. One of my cousins has a daughter who is pretty severely physically disabled. He got tickets to the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle through some organization connected to her needs. We were going to spend the day at the zoo. Unfortunately, nothing that involves my Washington relatives ever gets started early in the day. It doesn't matter what the plan is, as a group, they're incapable of getting moving in a timely way in the morning. So it was after noon when we finally got going, and then we couldn't go straight to the zoo because people needed coffee and the first place we stopped for coffee wasn't good enough. We also had to go pick up S.'s son from his grandmother's house. After much todo, coffee and my younger cousin were acquired and we got on the freeway going towards Seattle. As we're driving through Seattle, S. suddenly admitted that he didn't know how to get to the zoo. S.'s phone doesn't have data, so it wasn't useful for finding the zoo. My other cousin, N.'s phone has the location stuff disabled because she's afraid of being tracked, so it wasn't useful. I don't have a smartphone and my iPad was refusing to use GPS without being connected to wifi which meant I had to figure out where we were before I could try to figure out how to get where we needed to be. (My iPad got over its snit with GPS at some point after I came home. I have no idea why it had the snit or why it got over it.) The solution we eventually came up with was to make N.'s phone create a wifi hotspot that S.'s phone could connect to. Why couldn't anyone say they didn't know how to get there before we left the house? Or even before we were past the correct exit on the freeway? I could have gotten us good directions before we left. It isn't very hard to get there, but I hadn't been there in 30 or 40 years and didn't exactly remember where it was. So we finally got there at 2 PM. Then my cousin couldn't find the tickets. He ended up talking us in without them. N. had brought her little emotional support dog with her and the zoo only allows properly trained service animals, so the little dog had to go back in the van. Once we finally got through the gate, we had to find my uncle and my other younger cousins, who it turned out parked on the opposite side of the zoo. By then it was raining. Soon after it was pouring. The zoo closed at 5. We did see a few animals. We also rode the carousel multiple times. I ended up feeling very frustrated with all of them. Still, it was good to spend time with them even if we didn't see much of the zoo.




Woodland Park has Humboldt Penguins.



( More penguins )

The Malayan Tiger was fairly active, although getting a decent photo of it through the glass and the crowd wasn't easy.



( Another tiger photo and a few other animals )


The carousel was the star of the day though. My younger cousins all wanted to ride it over and over. I think the attendant was rather lax about counting how many rides we got for our tickets.




Carousel PTC 45 was made by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in 1918. Its deck is 50 feet across and it has 48 hand-carved horses and 2 chariots, each one unique. It was built for the Cincinnati Zoo then sold to an amusement park in California in the 1970s. They put it in storage in the 1990s. It was eventually tracked down and purchased for Woodland Park by a couple of carousel lovers.