Visiting the Dallas Zoo

In May we took a week long family trip to Dallas as a piggyback on my husband's business travel. One of my favorite things to do with my daughters is visit the zoo, so I've made it a fun goal to visit different zoos across the country when the opportunity presents itself.

We actually ended up visiting the Dallas Zoo two days in a row. This was in part because of my sprained ankle that happened the day before our flight and because I spent most of first day in the Zoo North part of the park, only realizing at the very end that the Wilds of Africa part was worthy of an additional day as well. Luckily I have an annual membership at our local zoo which granted me discounted tickets to any AZA accredited zoo, so it was totally affordable to go twice!

It's kind of fun getting to seeing a different zoo that is across the country because animals behave differently based on the climate. Seattle is very temperate and you don't get a lot of extreme weather, but I'm sure that the warm climate creatures missing their natural sunshine. For the time we spent in Dallas it was in the mid 80's, fairly humid with scattered thunder showers. It was amusing to see what thunder showers mean to Texans versus what it means to a Washingtonian. In Western Washington we really don't get a whole lot of thunder storms. But when the thunder started rolling at the Dallas Zoo, I quickly saw the umbrellas and ponchos get broken out. Then it started to rain...and it was warm. Yes, the stereotype is mostly true, it rains a lot in Washington but a girl gets used to it. But warm rain, on a hot day, was actually nice! It was funny to notice that difference.

At the age of 3, Penny is really into dinosaurs. We even had a fairy-dinosaur joint birthday party for per and Ruby back in March. So imagine this girl's glee when we walk into the park and she spots something very peculiar on the ground..

Nope, we definitely don't have these in Seattle!

It was awesome witnessing her reaction to seeing "real" dinosaurs; as most of these were animatronic and fairly realistic, even to an adult.

She also had to make sure that each dinosaur was appropriately roared at.

Onward we went and discovered The Steam, which was a play area designed to look like a stream for children (and their parents) to cool off in. We spent a lot of time here, wading through the water, Penny jumping from different rock features and Ruby testing the waters as she toddled around.

But the part of the zoo that has me raving about is the Wilds of Africa portion. It was truly impressive because of the truly open layout of the savannah that momentarily takes you away from a zoo in Texas to actually seeing what it looks like in nature. As a matter of fact, this was the first exhibit in North America to combine elephants with zebras, giraffes, impalas, ostriches and guinea fowl in the same habitat!  

The Woodland Park Zoo recently transitioned their elephant herd to the Tulsa Zoo and it was incredibly surprising to see how many elephants the Dallas Zoo has; at one point I photographed 5 in the same picture.

Penny enjoyed the giraffe exhibit as well - the giraffe heads were at eye level with us so we were able to get pretty close to them. Sadly we just learned that the little baby in the herd died last week because of an injury.

Stay tuned for more of our adventures in Dallas, Texas!
Part 1: Getting there and staying at The Omni

Have you visited the Dallas Zoo? 

Tell me about your favorite exhibit!

Catch up on my other zoo trips across North America!