Snowleopard's Dutch Sights, Belgian Delights & German Ratites

Surely this should have made it on to the 50 must see zoos list.

 

First of all, I'm glad to read about someone who is planning this kind of zoo trips, including tide schedules, distance/driving hours, opening & closing times, accommodations, and all that other fine stuff to prepare such exiting trips. It's the way I also do it, including the preplanning. Few things are more enjoyable on such trips as a early day breakfast in your hotel and leaving the parking lot exactly on the scheduled time to the first of your 3 zoos on the same day stops.

Bronx Zoo: I can imagine that, this got to be the largest zoo with the worst opening hours. 10 am to 5 pm, really WCS? I'm struggling with that for my 2019 NY visit, so i intend to make a 2-days visit.

Antwerp and Planckendael on the same day would only be possible in summer and only with an KMDA membership pass: it allows you to enter the zoo 1 hour earlier than daytrippers. Antwerp is small in size but with a full zoo menu (aquarium, reptilehouse, tropical birdhouse, nocturnal house, monkeyhouse) it will take at least 4 hours. But you will probably visit all major exibits twice

I suggest to reconsider your itinerary on day 15 and 16: it's a bit odd driving from Beesd first to Rhenen then to Tilburg and back to Arnhem, while you were already around Eindhoven (which is close to Tilburg). Consider a 2 days stay around Eindhoven, visiting Best-Safari Beekse Bergen - Overloon - Nuenen - Gemert - Veldhoven. Then the day after : combine Beesd and Leerdam in the morning and drive to Ouwehands to highlight your day.

 

Definitely would recommend that. While I believe one could physically walk around the zoo and see every display in a single day. It would leave you little to no time to pay attention to the unique species (maleo, gelada, anhinga,...), amazing architecture, NYC's last significant old-growth forest or the wonderful interpretive displays in almost every exhibit. Jungleworld for example can hold more for an hour plus. Hope you have a lot of fun. The hours have always sucked for the Bronx Zoo, like I always questioned why in warm months it did not open at 9am like many zoos I have been to. Its annoying, but as a local, I never worry about seeing every exhibit-every time.

 

You'll definitely need 2 days at the Bronx Zoo. A wonderful facility, but surely one of the worst major zoos on the planet in terms of its operating hours. Many prominent American zoos are open from at least 9:00 or 9:30 a.m. in the summer and close at around 6:00 or later at night. The Bronx's 10-5 hours really are a joke for zoo nerds.

Thanks for your advice on my itinerary and I'll consider some changes. However, a lot of my decisions are determined by the hours of the zoos that I'm planning to visit. In that general area, both BestZOO and ZooParc Overloon open at 9:30 a.m. and that is why they are the first zoo of the day on back-to-back days. Whichever zoo opens first is the one that I'm going to go to first in order to start the day as early as possible. I'm literally just sitting around and waiting for zoos to open their doors.

Also, you mention going to "Leerdam in the morning" but that is impossible as that tiny zoo is only open during afternoons and not even on Mondays. Also, I have the zoo in Nuenen last on one day because that place is open 30 minutes longer than several others in the area. The different operating hours of all of these establishments makes things tricky to plan, and my hardest task was in 2015 when I toured 81 zoos that summer and I spent a whole year planning that road trip. You mentioned "tide schedules" and that made me chuckle.

 

From a management point of view: Hours like that work in well with normal working days for employees and suit 99% of visitors. To extend them would produce rostering problems and increase staffing costs out of proportion to the additional hours. A zoo would want to be assured that the extended hours would pay form themselves in increased visitor numbers. Something I have not said before but felt many times reading posts: a zoo that set out to cater primarily for Zoochatters would soon be broke!

 

I've been in the Bronx Zoo before: spending up to 3 hrs in the magnificent World of Birds.... rushing through to the zoo grounds towards Jungleworld & Asia Trail...so I missed the Carter Building...

'Luckily' the World of Darkness' and the Mousehouse were closed, and the Gorillaforest and Madagascar didn't exist at that time...

This time, I intend to go on my own without brothers or friends who desperately want to see a lion and and an elephant.

 

Snowleopard,

First of all I'm glad to hear that you will be visiting the "lowlands" of western Europe and their zoological facilities. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think of the zoos I'm familiar with and have visited before.

I believe others in this topic and elsewhere have given you plenty of information already, and I'm not sure I have that much to add.

You have already been alerted to the issue of traffic congestion and traffic jams in Belgium and the Netherlands, I hear. To that I can only add that, if at all possible, you should absolutely avoid the ring road/beltway around Brussels (the R0) during morning and evening rush hours, and preferably, if you can, all day on week days.

As far traffic jams go... from what I hear they are somewhat different in the months of July and August. Rush hours and some roads are often less busy than usual in the summer months because people are having their vacations and possibly going abroad or to other regions of the country. However, especially during some summer weekends when a lot of people are traveling some roads, especially the ones going down south, can actually be busier. And at least in Belgium during the weekends, public holidays and fridays with nice weather the roads that travel towards the coast can get very, very busy indeed.

Another thing I thought of concerns Antwerp. You might be aware that unlike many zoos Zoo Antwerpen does not have its own parking lot. There are parkings nearby but they are mostly privately owned and can be somewhat expensive. There are, however, some free parkings as well park and rides outside the city center, on the outskirts of Antwerp or in towns near Antwerp, from where you can travel to the city center using public transport (trams, which will cost you 3 euros for an hour if you buy a standard ticket).

You can find some information on parking in Antwerp here (I searched for an English source for you):
Parking in Antwerp

As far as Antwerpen and Planckendael go, I wouldn't mind joining you for your visits if I can be available on those days. Not to give you a tour, mind you, but as a joint visit. I think it could be interesting for me to tour my local zoos with a person who has seen so much good, bad and ugly in the world of zoological facilities. And maybe it would be interesting for you to visit with a local who knows these zoos fairly well (I'm sure there's people here who do better, though).

 

I think one hour is to much for Snowleopard for Ostende Aquarium. This is several rather small, old fashioned tanks with North Sea fauna. Guidebook to this aquarium (maybe still on sale) is bigger than Aquarium itself. But 20 km from Ostende, in Koksijde-Oostduinkerke is Navigo – National Fishery Museum which also includes aquarium. Two bigger tanks and two or three smaller – around 30 species from North Sea. So you can easy visit five zoos this day (but in a different order: Blankenberge, Ostende, Oostduinkerke and Brugge). I think you can also cut your visit to Serpentarium to one hour – nice place but without rare seen species (I spend there couple of hours but I visited that day only one zoo ).

 

What a shame that you will go in 2019 instead this year, otherwise we could do the trip together! (I will do the tour this September, tough with muuuuch less zoos for visit)

 

I haven't posted on this thread in 24 days and so it is time for an update!

Thanks very much @KevinB for your excellent advice and I'm definitely up for meeting anyone on my big European trip. I appreciate the input that I've received on this thread, as well as from several other zoo nerds via private messages and emails. On all of my 8 USA zoo trips, as well as when I visited 14 zoos in Australia in 2007, I planned everything myself with basically zero help from anyone. This time around, on what is really my 10th zoo trip and final one for a few years, I've been grateful to read about recommendations for my journey.

Thanks for the advice @Arek and does this day in Belgium look good?:

Serpentarium Blankenberge (Blankenberge, BE) 10-11
drive 10 minutes
Sea Life Blankenberge (Blankenberge, BE) 11:30-12:30
drive 30 minutes
Aquarium de la Mer du Nord (Ostend, BE) 1-2
drive 30 minutes
NAVIGO – National Fisheries Museum (Oostduinkerke, BE) 2:30-3:30
drive 45 minutes
Boudewijn Seapark (Bruges, BE) 4:30-6

Of course it will not take me a full hour to visit the Sea Life Aquarium, or even close to an hour to visit the Aquarium in Ostend, but when I plan my itinerary I have to allow for a little bit of extra time to grab a quick lunch somewhere, or to find parking, or to navigate a traffic jam, etc. Aside from any disasters, visiting 4-5 small places on several days of the trip should be remarkably easy and I'd honestly add on even more zoos if they had late-night hours. The big zoos on this Euro trek are obviously going to be the highlights but there is something wonderful about visiting several obscure zoos that most people have never even heard of and I take great delight in doing just that.

On a separate note, I've been talking things over with my wife far more than I've ever done on my past zoo trips. She is really urging me to go for longer in 2019 because the plan is to then not have any zoo trips in 2020 or even 2021 and therefore not again until 2022. These big summer journeys are expensive every year! So...I've got a new rough draft that sees a reworking of some of the days that I posted earlier, plus the inclusion of an extra week onto the trip. When someone looks at the entire experience then it seems crazy and immense, but by breaking it down into separate days then my plans are totally feasible and it all makes sense.

I'm not going to post an updated full itinerary at this point, but the latest plan has me visiting 47 Dutch zoos, 12 Belgian zoos and at least 25 German zoos. If I have to miss a few small places due to traffic congestion then that will be no big deal and the 'butterfly-greenhouse zoos' will be the first to go. I'll be gone for 30-31 days and will visit perhaps 85 zoos in total...depending on future changes that I make to my plans. I'll depart Vancouver Airport on approximately July 15th, 2019, and leave Amsterdam Airport on approximately August 14th, 2019 to return home.

The additions are mainly German zoos that are near the Dutch/Belgian border: Cologne, Wuppertal, Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen, Duisburg, Krefeld, Aquazoo Lobbecke in Dusseldorf and a handful of smaller German zoos in the south. I'm still toying with the notion of adding on Frankfurt and/or Opel Zoo in Kronberg. For example, it would be possible to spend 5.5 hours at Frankfurt Zoo, a facility with several animal houses but small acreage, drive to Kronberg and then still have a full 4 hours at that zoo. Or even 6 hours at Frankfurt and 3.5 at Opel. (Just one of countless items to consider when rearranging such a vast itinerary as both of those zoos have 9:00-7:00 hours and are open later than most places...and Opel Zoo has a fairly new, impressive-looking elephant exhibit)

Slightly more to the north, I've added in German zoos such as Osnabruck, Rheine, Munster, Hannover, Nordhorn and a few minor facilities such as zoos in Bielefeld and Gronau as they both have early opening hours and will be easy to visit at the crack of dawn before I start my day.

Stay tuned!

 

Walsrode. Surely you’re going to go to Walsrode?

 

Walsrode is really far from Benelux, it isn't?

 

Maybe, but it’s very close to Hannover.

 

I encourage you not to overlook the opportunity to visit a Wildpark or two. Your agenda puts Gangelt in easy reach. In the Frankfurt area Hanau has a nice park as well. Trust me on this! ;-)

 

For the second time in a week on this forum, all I can say is WOW, just... totally wow!

 

What was the first thing that brought about a proclamation of such excitement?

 

If you don't visit Walsrode whilst at Hannover you really will be persona non grata.