Any Zoos you plan on visiting next year?

Later this week I'll embark on another Walsrode trip, and I'll visit Zoo Osnabrück as well. Main goals species-wise are Drill and Mechow's Mole Rat in the latter and Maleo, Fawn-Breasted Bowerbird, Raggiana Bird-of-Paradise and Black-Tailed Trogon in the former. But I'm mostly there to enjoy a great zoo and not to hunt for species.

 

My trip on August will focus on Zoorasia and Ueno, with one or two more minor zoos.

 

I will fly to Tokyo next Tuesday for a short trip. I hope to visit 4-6 zoos within my four day stay at Tokyo.(need to fly back before 1st September--school start).
Those 6 zoos on my shortlist are the two mention, an aquarium, a small zoo with some native animals, and two lesser known one(one even don't have a gallery). I'm not sure I can visit all six of them though.
Wanna make a guess on which the other four is?

 

I'm getting VERY excited right now because my parents have agreed to go to California (in theory) to see San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sequoia NP but also, more notably, Monterey Bay Aquarium and SDZ!!!

Getting really hyped and already started planning SDZ even though it's only a possibility, and, knowing my parents, it'll just fall through eventually just as Berlin and Prague did this summer

 

Ah- That's what I call luck! I wish I could afford visiting SDZ.

 

How long would you be going to California for? That's a lot of ground to cover. Also, don't miss the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, it's pretty far out of San Diego, but well worth it and probably the second best zoo in the state.

 

I second this. Both zoos are definitely in my top 10 visited (out of approx, 78 total zoos/aquaria visited). I hope you enjoy it!

 

My parents only just allowed the detour down to San Diego for the zoo - if I were to try to push the Safari Park as well...

I'll see how it turns out, but I've also managed to squeeze in Whale watching in Monterey, so that should be fun. I might subtly campaign for the Safari Park but too much might just make them regret even letting us go to SDZ...

At any rate, I will try. Luckily, if those platypuses get there beforehand, I might have another bargaining chip

 

Monterey Bay and San Francisco are pretty far from LA and SD.. When I visited California in 2018 as part of a roadtrip, I didn't even make it far enough north to visit Monterey Bay despite making it north enough to see the elephant seals at Morro Bay. If I were you, I might suggest rearranging the trip to focus on the LA and SD areas (there are a lot of nice zoos and parks in that region) and have your one detour be up to Monterey Bay. This way, if a detour has to be cut, you're missing out on "just" the aquarium as opposed to several major zoos. The Aquarium of the Pacific in LA also has whale watching tours if it comes down to it. And one more thing, I wouldn't plan to have my visits to the LA or SD Zoos be on the same day you travel to those cities, unless you're leaving extremely early. The traffic in-between those two cities has got to be some of the absolute worst in entire world. Google Maps estimates the drive time to be roughly 2 hours. In my experience, add at least another 2-4 on top of that.

Fingers crossed with planning your trip, though! I hope it all comes together for you.

~Thylo

 

Yeah, that’s what I did on my California trip, the farthest north I went was LA, although Monterrey is definitely doable. The Scripps Aquarium in San Diego also runs whale-watching tours. In my experience, the traffic between San Diego and LA wasn’t really that bad, it only took 2 and a half hours and the drive was very scenic.

 

Thank you!!!
I did a bit of digging online and found that apparently, the most scenic part of the route was the Monterey - Morro bay stretch. Taking into account your experiences, I have slightly changed the route:

Day 1: Fly to San Francisco
Day 2: Golden gate bridge and walk around Pier 39 (like real tourists )
Day 3: Walk around San Francisco in the morning, drive to Monterey
Day 4: Monterey Bay Aquarium!!!
Day 5: Whale watching and more fun
Day 6: Drive past Big Sur along Route 1 and arrive at Morro Bay. Elephant seals.
Day 7: Drive to Sequoia NP and walk around in the late afternoon
Days 8 and 9: Sequoia NP hiking
Day 10: Morning in Sequoia NP and drive down via Bakersfield to LA
Day 11: LA
Day 12: LA and then drive to San Diego via Route 15 to avoid traffic
Day 13: SDZ!!!!
Day 14: Get back to LA and fly back home!

Sadly since my parents aren't the keenest of zoo visitors, I don't think we can visit more than 2 collections without them losing their sanity. So... I guess LA zoo and SDZSP will have to wait... . The reason why we have to go from San Francisco to LA at least is because we need to fly there and back, so... Plus, we do need to see San Francisco harbour because my grandparents lived their for 6 months on their boat before their attempt to cross the Pacific on an entirely self-built boat

 

Sounds amazing. Good luck!

 

Next year I'm hoping to visit:
Wroclaw
(At least one other collection on the journey from Poland to Germany)
Köln (probably only if the Birds of Paradise are on display)
Wilhelma
Pairi Daiza
Vogelpark Avifauna
Chester
Hamerton

These are the definite ones but will see if I can fit anything else in

 

I did a lot of traveling this year and saw several zoos for the first time (Denver x2, Nashville, SDZ, SDZSP) so I'm happy with that, although I'm broke now haha. So next year I won't be traveling as much. I tentatively want to do a road trip to central Florida, so maybe Central Florida Zoo or Zoo Tampa. Other than that, I tentatively, if I have the money, want to go on a short trip to either Chicago or New York - so I'll hit up one of those zoos if I go.

 

When are you going again? The elephant seals are only present for the birthing season I believe.

~Thylo

 

I checked this too - they are present from around March to October and I am going in April, it'll just be females and calves around but still impressive.

 

With fall coming I hope to start going to more zoos, my main plans are Columbus, Minneapolis, and Indianapolis

 

I highly recommend going to Minnesota Zoo in the winter if possible.

 

Definitely Brookfield, Lincoln Park, Toledo, Buffalo, and Detroit Zoos and Shedd Aquarium (all places I've been to before)
Probably Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig Zoos. Never been to these places before (and no, I do not mean Tierpark Berlin, I mean Berlin Zoo)