A Day at London Zoo.

Thursday 01 May.

It’s the first day of May and it has been raining over night, but with us both being shattered we heard nothing until 7am. I got up and made us a cup of tea, which we enjoyed in bed. Marmite curled up at the foot of the bed, and we snoozed for an hour. We got up at 8am, had breakfast and I walked Paddy on the only green area at Little Venice.The decision was taken not to move out of Paddington Basin, we are going to stop till after the weekend, so we can take in the atmosphere of the Little Venice Cavalcade, so we thought that for today we would go to London Zoo, which was a first for me and I was pretty excited. So I made us a packed lunch, as eating out can sometimes get expensive, we then headed off on our walk to Regents Park, it took us around 20 minutes to walk to the Park, which looked stunning with all the spring flowers out in bloom. The first thing you really notice is the huge lake, which has a wealth of waterfowl on it
It had been a long time since I had seen Whooper Swans, but the regents Park Lake has a pair of them.
There were also other birds which I cannot find in my bird book.

Anyone know what this goose is?
The whole park was a hive of activity, with joggers, walkers etc all enjoying this beautiful place.
We then walked on and arrived in Baker Street which is famous for Sherlock Holmes.
221b Baker Street, which is where Sherlock Holmes was to be seen.We arrived at the Zoo and qued to get in, along with children who were not at school, due to their schools being used as Polling Stations, for the London Mayoral Election. Not sure we came on the right day ha ha ha. Any way Keith paid the £34 for us to get in (ouch). The first port of call was the café for a coffee, as were both parched having walked for more than half an hour. Now any boater who has been on the regents Canal will know that it runs through the zoo. You walk over the canal to see the giraffe and you can see Snowdon Aviary from the canal.
The zoo has areas which you can walk through and be in with the birds and animals; one of the best was the Amazon house, where we saw this very beautiful sloth, enjoying the sunshine, whilst having a shower. They actually try to simulate the Amazon, it was extremely hot, either that or I was having a manopausal moment.Having been around some of this vast sight we then sat down and had lunch with Guy the Gorilla’s statue looking on.There was so much to see and way too many photographs to put on the diary. What were amazing were the colours of the birds that we saw.It is a place you can never grow tired of. We also saw the old favourites, the lion and tigers.One of the places we visited was the Gorilla house, where the Silver Back was sat enjoying a rest out of the weather, which had been unpredictable.I am a big lover of fish, and over the years have had my own aquariums, so it was great to see the Aquarium house and the beautiful creature in there.The Seahorse is so graceful.Keith and I took a walk through the Reptile house, being up close and personal with some of the snakes that we only ever see on TV was really odd, and just a little scary.Some we had never seen before including this blue frog which is extremely poisoness, but remarkable beautiful.Isn’t wildlife wonderful, and without zoo’s we would never get to see such beauty, love them or hate them zoos are helping endangered animals to survive.It was 4.30pm before we left the zoo, and both had tired legs and feet, but we still had the walk back to the boat. The weather all day had been pretty good considering we had thunder, lightening and about 6 spots of rain through out the time at the zoo. We paid for it though once back at the boat. During the evening the rain lashed down and the thunder rumbled, scaring both Marmite and Paddy. Tomorrow we are going into the city, so stay tuned for the next adventure