01-20-09 Zoo and Casa Bonita:
Today we set aside time to go to Colorado Springs (about 3 hours from Estes Park) to hit up the AMAZING Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and Casa Bonita in Denver. This zoo really is stunning, if you're ever in the area you'd be foolish to miss it.
The first animal encounter at the zoo is with the giraffes. This is the first one we saw. I can do that too.
This is a live (as in right NOW) shot from acamera that will show Giraffes at a zoo if the weather is good and it's during the day in Colorado. We have been rather obsessed with this cam for about a year now and it's been a running gag with some people I work with that I'm going to actually go out to the 'nubbin cam'.
So I did. And A dude I work with saved the pictures of us there. This is me on the phone telling him to "F5 the nubbin cam."
We bought some crackers to feed the giraffes. See tounge.
See tounge pt 2.
Kyde squeeling as she feeds a giraffe some crackers. A tight zoom on a fuzzy nubbins. A giraffe making out with the fence. A shot of the under-a-year-old baby giraffe and the nubbin neighbors, some ugly pig things.
The baby giraffe had the fuzziest nubbins of them all.
This goat thing was doing a pretty good job of staring at the wall.
The zoo is basically built into the side of a mountain. This is the view from the giraffe enclosure which is basically at the lowest point of the zoo.
This is the inside of the giraffe house. And here we have your standard Kyde.
On the way up the hill we came across some pretty active monkeys.
And then we came aross this, which was just really really funny. The wallabys just seems annoyed with the peacock, but the peacock seemed PISSED OFF.
Kyde had a fake bear encounter.
And then we had a real one. This bear enclosure is really cool, if you look up the hill they have a mountain-type area that is actually pretty large to go up, and at the bottom there is this fake little river/pond they can get into that actually has real fish in it. Obviously there is some glass between the bear and the people, but in a very intense moment this bear was slamming his giant paws against the glass right where we were sitting with our faces against it. He was totally aware we were there and it was all very overwhelming in a good way. A good example of how cool this zoo is.
Casa Bonita is CRAZY. My friend Justin told us to go as he used to live in the Denver area. He explained it as "Chuck-e-Cheese's on crack" which is probably a pretty good description, only it's less dirty than a Chuck-e-Cheese's and they serve Mexican food instead of bad pizza. There are cliff divers, dudes in gorilla suits, "gun fights", a scary cave, arcades and fire jugglers to name a few things. It's just unreal.
This is inside of Casa Bonita. You walk down this absurdly long mess of an empty line to get to the point where you order food. You place your order then head down more of the empty line to a point where it is unclear as what to do. We just walked right on by, but were informed you need to pick up your food and take it to your table. We also show the walk into the main dining area followed by the Mariachi band and one of the cliff divers. If you just want to see the cliff diver jump to 7:30.
We were trying to set the timer on our camera to take out picture behind the waterfall the cliff divers jump off of and another couple got in the shot. Kyde said "do you want to be in a picture?" and they said "no" and then POOF the camera went off. Haha.
This was in one of the arcades. Hrm.
NEXT!