The zoo? Brad went to the zoo? You may be thinking that I have lost my mind. Or maybe you think I am homebound and bored, and need to travel. You would be 100% correct. But you know what? I had an AWESOME time at the zoo!

And I will tell you my biggest challenge for this post was culling down the number of photos to include. If I included all the photos I would have liked to include, your lights would have dimmed.

We hadn’t been to the zoo since the kids were small. When I asked Karen yesterday if she wanted to go to the zoo with me on a cold, misty and cloudy day, she said, well, as delightful and intriguing as that might be to watch me take pictures for a couple of hours, she would take one for the team and stay home.

Sitting within sight of the state house, Zoo Atlanta sits in Grant Park, one of the 200+ in-town neighborhoods within the city of Atlanta. Grant Park contains a large number of Victorian homes and cottages, and craftsman style bungalows, as well as being home to sites of historic significance including the Oakland Cemetery.

You should also be aware that adjacent to the zoo is the Cyclorama, which while currently closed and under renovation is a large panoramic painting depicting the Battle of Atlanta in 1864 during the Civil War. Panoramas apparently were popular before the advent of motion pictures; I take this on good authority as even as old as I am I can neither confirm nor deny this point.

But enough about history and geography; we’re talking about a zoo with lions, tigers, and dancing bears. Oh, and there are flamingos (a nod to all you flamingo groupies out there).

Full disclosure: I did not see any of the bears dancing, but they did have a little swagger. I did see lions, tigers, bears, gorillas, pandas (one of the few places in the world where you can see pandas), and a long list of other mammals, birds and reptiles.

I am not sure what I might have liked best – there were so many interesting exhibits and animals here. There is an entire section on African plains, where you can see elephants, hippopotamus, warthogs, and giraffes – you know, the usual suspects. Pretty cool.

And of course there is the Scaly, Slimy, Spectacular House where you can see all manners of things you are happy are behind glass.

For me one of the most interesting parts of the zoo was the Ford African Rain Forest, which is where the gorilla habitat is located. These animals (hard to think of them as animals when you see their faces up close) are spectacular and interesting to just watch as they interact with each other – I could have spent hours watching them.

The Asian Forest housed Orangutans, Otters, Tigers, Leopards, a Komoda Dragon, the Pandas, and some wild kind of birds. Quite a collection!!

The zoo was a great place to go and reminded me there’s a lot of cool stuff hidden right before your eyes. If you haven’t been to a zoo in a few years, you may want to give it a thought!