by Angie Pollock

Created on: July 26, 2009

The Smithsonian National Zoological Park (National Zoo) in Washington, D.C. is a free attraction visited by approximately 2 million locals and tourists yearly. The park has 163 acres of exhibits and animals on display with the main attraction being the resident panda bears. Like with other travel destinations, this zoo has some advantages and disadvantages and most visitors have mixed reactions after spending a day touring the park.

We visited the National Zoo in July, 2009 during our D.C. vacation. The park opens at 8 a.m. but most of the exhibits and animals are not able to be seen until 10 a.m. Upon recommendations from other visitors, we arrived early as the parking lot is known to fill up quickly which costs $20 for the day. A Metro station is located several blocks from the zoo if you prefer not to drive. Admission to the zoo is completely free. We first rented a stroller ($9) for our youngest and interestingly enough, the employee remarked "the stroller is due back by 5:30 but I doubt you'll be here that long". That clearly told me that what we thought was going to be an all-day adventure, would only last a few hours - which proved to be correct.

First thing in the morning presented very little visitors but by 10 a.m., the park was clearly filling up especially with school groups. The outdoor exhibits were everything that we expected and the panda bears were out snoozing in the morning sun. With the exception of the fishing cat, all of the animals were out in their pens and viewable by the visitors but by noon, most of the animals went into hiding to escape the heat. Surprisingly, the indoor exhibits were more amazing then those found outdoors. We were able to observe some amazing creatures from the ocean and some creepy, crawly bugs that were a highlight of the trip for the kids.

A feature that I truly enjoyed seeing was one of their resident elephant's getting its bath. Inside the Elephant House at 10:30 a.m., a 7-year old Asian elephant was scrubbed from head to toe and the trainers answered questions from the crowd. And there was definitely a crowd for this event. Following the elephant bath (11:00 a.m.), two elephants are brought into an area outside the Elephant House for visitors to see some of the training of the elephants. We did watch part of this show but because of the school groups (and chaperones) carrying on and yelling, we were unable to hear what was being said by the announcer so we moved on.

The major disappointments of this zoo were the amount of animals and the layout. For this to be a National Zoo, one would expect a lot more. We recently had visited a small safari type zoo in a small town of Arkansas the week before this and found it had more to offer than the National Zoo. Many areas of the zoo were under construction and were blocked off so this caused us to back track through areas that we had already seen. Most of our time was spent walking (sometimes in circles). A map of the zoo can be purchased for $2 but there are also permanent maps posted in several areas of the park.

As a family, we have visited many major zoos including San Diego Zoo and more recently the Miami Zoo. Both of these animal parks had more to offer than the National Zoo. We easily spent all day at the other zoos but were finished at the National Zoo by 1 p.m. and we visited every area of the zoo including the highly disappointing Kid's Farm which hosted some goats, donkeys, and cows. There weren't any hands-on exhibits available for children during our visit. For a free zoo, the Smithsonian National Zoological Park was good but nothing spectacular and the greatest advantage of this zoo would have to be that it was free.

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