Closing Thoughts

It’s Wednesday evening and tomorrow we head back to College Station. This will be my final post in the 2010 Travel Blog (you’re welcome) and my final composition EVER in the event that our plane crashes on the way back to Austin or (more likely) somebody goes Postal during another four-hour pre-flight delay. Seattle and north-central Washington in general have been a lot of fun, so I’ve decided to just toss out some bullet-points and let them serve as this year’s farewell.

• One of the highlights of the last couple of days (coinciding, not coincidentally, with our return to the States) has been local fruit. Peaches get a B-plus -- not as sweet as the Fredericksburg crop, but absolutely gushing with juice. They’re clearly a VERY different variety and the contrast is interesting. Apricots get an A-minus and are far better than any I’ve had before. But the real winner is Rainier cherries. While that obviously makes sense given our location, the difference between just picked versus having been picked and then shipped to College Station really is astounding. I buy them every chance I get at home for more than double the price I paid here ... and for half the taste. There is a lesson to be learned there somewhere.
  
  
• The kids liked Seattle. Hunter probably liked it more than anyone else. Reagan claims that he would like city living, but after driving around on extremely cramped streets for a couple of days and spending an hour or so negotiating Pike Place Market (it was a very rare, clear-as-a-bell summer day and the crowds were insane), he’s had enough. I’d usually be right there with him, but I really like the Market. So much cool food -- loads of weird fruits and vegetables / infinite varieties of fresh fish / random and quirky pastry shops -- not to mention the outstanding people-watching possibilities. This is one of the few crowded places I’ve ever been where I don’t get claustrophobic almost immediately. It was wayyyyyyyyy more chaotic today than when Paige and I were here a few years ago, yet I would’ve been happy to hang out there all afternoon. And no I am NOT getting more “tolerant” (in general) with age. Ask anyone.
  
  
• On Tuesday, we went to the Seattle Zoo. Their environments are great and they have quite a few exhibits that aren’t very common as these things go. But after having been there for 2 1/2 hours, I started thinking about how I might change things if I were the Big Cheese. Here’s what I came up with (with some assistance from Paige) ...
  
  More Free-Flight / Free Roaming Areas
  The Seattle Zoo has roughly 27 different aviaries. I actually really like birds, but at some point it just gets a little ridiculous. In Mike’s Zoo we definitely would have a couple of aviaries. But we’d also have a free-flight / free-roaming bugiary. I can envision at least three sections -- Biting, Stinging, and In-the-Dark. Rules for the bugiary would be the same as they are for aviaries. Specifically, you may not touch the bugs (which obviously precludes swatting / slapping / killing them) and you must be sure that Door #1 (between each section) is closed before opening Door #2. And in Mike’s Zoo, there wouldn’t be any of this having to hunt for featured creature X nonsense like there is in the typical zoo aviary. For the Biting and Stinging sections, “swarm” wouldn’t even begin to describe it ... and the In-the-Dark section would be a maze of spider webs. It’s high time these guys were afforded the same treatment as toucans, weavers, and random African pigeons.
  
  Cause and Effect
  At one point on Tuesday, Hadley was standing beside an exhibit and reading all of the information about the featured animal. Hunter was hassling her about something (shock) and she yelled at him (shock) to just STOP because she was trying to read this thing ... at which point he reminded her that she was, in fact, here to LOOK at the animals NOT read about them. I’ve often wondered about this, because it seems that an awful lot of work is put into the whole “education” aspect of a zoo. There’s a ton of information posted along with most of the exhibits, plus a lot of zoos even have separate centers aimed at teaching kids various things about the natural world. At their core, most of these exhibits are exercises in cause-and-effect. Y’know, people were bad in the past which made this animal (or this ecosystem; e.g., the rainforest) become endangered and now we’re trying to be better so the species / ecosystem can recover. In other words, we did this so this happened and now we’re trying to do THIS so THIS will happen. Well at Mike’s Zoo, cause-and-effect would be a daily hands-on experience. How? At the end of each afternoon, the kid voted Most Obnoxious by the staff would be forced to run the Predator Gauntlet. Cause? You were obnoxious. Effect? You have to pick up all five orange cones in the lion exhibit while wearing a 22-ounce porterhouse suspended from your neck. (Note: A tandem course in the grizzly exhibit will be constructed for your parent / guardian if he / she was heard to utter the phrase “high-spirited” at any point during the day.) If you survive, your parent / guardian gets one more chance at turning the discipline boat around and keeping you out of prison. If you don’t, your name goes on the Jungle Justice board in the Education Center.
  
  Theme Days
  Remember how when you were a kid and you went to the pool, they always had “adult swim”? Until I was well beyond the age of actually wanting to go to the pool, I never understood the point of reserving 15 minutes out of every hour (or whatever it was) for grown-ups to have things to themselves. Now, obviously, I do. In Mike’s Zoo, I see a number of different possibilities. One option would be to have an entire day (say, Tuesday of each week) reserved exclusively for adult patrons. Would revenues dip? Maybe. But the animal union probably would give me zookeeper tenure. Plus, I don’t know about you but I personally would be willing to pay a significant premium (probably on the order of about a thousand percent) to be able to go to a zoo and actually take my time with and enjoy the exhibits. As things currently stand, every time we approach a new section my audio sensors check for solo annoying kids while my radar simultaneously scans the immediate area for evidence of multiple small bodies wearing the same t-shirt (surefire evidence that a school or daycare center has decided to share its own special brand of fun with the zoo-going public). Actually, Adult Tuesdays could be combined with Field Trip Fridays -- the one day out of every week where Mike’s Zoo would open its loving arms wide to elementary schools and daycare centers. I’d even cut admission 50% to sweeten the pot. Of course I’d lock away all of the animals (thereby generating even MORE goodwill with them) and hang “Exhibit Temporarily Closed” and “Can You Find the (fill-in-the-blank)?” signs everywhere, but at the margin I don’t think it would matter. The 3% of kids who actually cared about seeing the animals would have parents who would bring them back on a “good” day anyway and the other 97% could still run around and scream and make random animal noises and buy Dippin’ Dots and destroy the gift shop. Win-Win.
  

I guess that’s about all I’ve got. Hopefully these posts haven’t been too tedious and you’ve gotten at least some enjoyment out of them. At a minimum, the process forces me to write stuff down about these family vacation experiences that otherwise I probably wouldn’t ... and that I’ll be very happy to have 20 years down the road. And for that, I thank you.

Happy Trails,

Mike