Lizzim 18 USA Trips: This year's Boxing Day Bargain is San Diego! Day 4

Another fairly early start – we woke up about 0600 went to the gym first and then breakfast at Arlo.

Today I had the 2 eggs breakfast but with toast instead od the biscuit and Rob had the carnivore omelette. He said it was nice, but a little bit odd in terms of how it was made.

After we were ready we got an uber to the San Diego Zoo. We bought tickets online outside again as the line was long – really we should just start buying tickets online before we get to the attractions!

We entered the zoo at just after 10 and wandered around without really consulting the map (which with hindsight was a little unwise.)

We did the tiger trail followed by hippos and some more big cats (aren’t you loving the detailed animal descriptions?)

The next section was zebras then polar bears before we took the skyline back to the other side. Rob is not keen on these but made the trip as it was a reasonably long walk.

We saw some birds, then tortoise and some alligators or crocodiles – again I know the details here are stunning but there are lots of photos!

It was almost lunchtime and we decided to get a sundae each - we both had banana splits….probably could have shared!

They were about $15 each so we assumed they would be smaller (theme park prices) but they were quite large but very good and it was warm so definitely a good choice for today.

Next up were koalas, meerkats, donkeys, llamas, camels and then elephants followed by lions.

We then looked at the ridiculously long line for the pandas which I’d guess it was at least 2 hours long. We realised that had we looked earlier you could book timeslots (a bit like fast pass) but we didn’t know about it earlier (see I said it was a mistake not consulting the map!)

Luckily one of the pandas was up on the hill and we managed to see both of them from over the fence (with a bit of stretching). Rob also managed to get a little bit of video

Based on what we saw I am not sure it was worth the long line…especially as there were many rules as to what you could and couldn’t do!

We moved on to the Pygmy hippos and gorillas and decided that we should start thinking about getting some food as I wanted to stay to see the xmas lights.

We managed to get an early dinner at Albert’s which was a nice little restaurant inside the park. It was much better than we expected, I had another salad (you saw the sundae earlier!) and Rob had steak frites.

This wasn’t the cheapest meal but it was a good break from the park – total cost was $85 inc tip.

We then carried on around and saw the flamingos before taking the skyline back to the other side – so that we could walk back and see the lights along the way.

We saw a mountain lion that clearly wanted to eat a small child – it was slightly spooky – she was stalking back and forth – obviously there was a glass fence between us but she really did seem to want to eat the child.