Our Monetary Donation to the City of Oakland

Some of you may or may not know this but the city of Oakland is not doing well budget wise. In an effort to help our friends in the bay, I took both kids to visit the Oakland Zoo. We had a great time despite the fact that the Oakland Zoo charges way too much for crappy food and rides. Apparently, they need every dollar they can get. Before I get into the picture portion of this blog entry, let it be known that Sam asked me to take pictures of some vulgar things. Although we consider Sam an articulate 4-year old, there are moments when, well, he's just a funny 4-year old. We begin this entry with some compulsory pictures of the animals at the zoo..BEHOLD:

Giraffes....

Llamas...

Lazy tigers....

And Sam's preferred method for looking at the animals....Had I known he'd be using the viewer for "viewing" pleasure, I would have brought the quarters we use for laundry.

At this point, Sam started making special requests regarding our picture taking. Hence, here is a picture of the elephant's butt. Why? Well, he had just seen another elephant take a seriously gigantic dump a moment before and he wanted to catch it on film. Nice, I know. Plus, who am I to deny him such pleasure?



We stayed with the elephants for a huge amount of time. We watched them eat their carrots and break a bunch of tree limbs. We also watch the wild turkeys in the area sift through the elephant's defecations. Apparently, elephants consume so much food that they do not metabolize everything they eat. The wild turkeys know this. Eewww! Luckily, Sam heard his favorite sound: a train whistle...and off we went to ride a train that cost me four bucks each and lasted less than five minutes. I'm telling you, Oakland is hurting. Bad. Real bad.

As an added bonus to our way-to-expensive train ticket, we got to inhale fumes from the train because Sam picked a seat directly behind the motor (Note to self: ignore Sam's choice next time). We did convince the conductor to take a picture of us so I guess the eight bucks wasn't so bad and the fumes were a necessary evil since we were in the VERY first seat. You'll notice, however, that the boy directly behind us doesn't seem to have the same opinion.

And where there are trains, there are cars. Here's Sam in his "race car":

This next shot is another Sam request...If you look very closely, this monkey is doing something most of us would not do in public.

The zoo has an entire children's area that is a lot of fun. There is a petting zoo which I somehow managed to avoid as well as this cool lily pad thing....

Isabella couldn't hop on the lily pads (for obvious reasons) and so she watched from a distance as her brother almost fell in about ten times.

Sam also managed to convince me to ride the sky lift. I hate sky lifts and this ensued another adventure that I will blog about at another time but do enjoy the picture:

We ended our visit with a nice family picture on a bench. It wasn't until I came home and realized that, directly to the left of the bench, there is a sign that mentions the group who donated funds for the exquisite bench: Triple X Fraternity. Nice, huh? I told you they were hurting.