Point Defiance Zoo

Mom's first time taking the kids to a zoo solo was so successful that she decided to try it again, this time with an outing to the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma. One of the first areas we found was a play area featuring this unusual sea creature:

We found more meerkats, just as photo-ready as the ones in Idaho.

It wasn't goat feeding time when we were there, but it was grooming time, much to Lydia's delight.

The zoo had a fair amount of northern animals, such as these reindeer, as well as others like red wolves, arctic foxes, and musk oxen. Summer isn't really the peak time for photographing them: they were all shedding.

We found a polar bear:

And a puffin:

Amanda thought the walruses were pretty cool:

We also found penguins:

And a camel ($5 to ride [we didn't], but no extra charge to photograph on your own):

The battery on Mom's camera ran out at the tigers:

After that, we found the aquarium section, which included some fairly impressive sharks. All in all, it was a "just right" sort of zoo, big enough to have all sorts of cool critters, but small enough that we made it through the whole thing in a couple of hours. On our way into the zoo, we'd seen a peacock roaming, and we saw a deer near the parking lot on the way out. We decided to take a loop drive around Point Defiance after we left the zoo to see if we could find any other critters. The forest there was highly scenic, and we did indeed find more wildlife: not one, but two live racoons! That brings Mom's live raccoon sightings up to four. All in all, a very nice outing.