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Colleen was up to her old tricks this past weekend when she decided to plan a secret Saturday morning activity. When I tried to guess where we  were going, she said to expect to be outside most, if not all of the time. She also got our daypack together so I was expecting some hiking.

I was wrong :-p

As we headed north towards Escondido, I made a remark “oh, we really need to go to the Wild Animal Park next weekend.” As it turns out, we wouldn’t have to wait that long. We got a yearly membership last February when Sarah, Colleen’s sister, came to visit and we went to the SD Zoo. The membership runs out at the end of March—and we’ve both decided not to renew—but we have been talking about going to the Wild Animal Park for a while so the time was ripe. I visited a few years ago and really enjoyed it because of the large open spaces with lots of different animals commingling. The SD Zoo is cool but I liked the openness of the Wild Animal Park much more.

Based on my description, I think Colleen was expecting something totally different but it still is pretty zoo-like. Still I think she enjoyed it, especially the train ride that was part of the Journey Into Africa tour (yes, I still consider it a train, even if it isn’t on a track!). It must have been mating season not long ago because half the animals there were knocked up or just had babies. We did learn an interesting fact about the park though: it was originally created as a place to breed rhinos, apparently a very picky bunch. It was very successful at doing just that and just expanded from there.

After nearly 4 hours at the park, we had enough though and decided to get some lunch from the Vegan Zone. We’ve been wanting to go since it opened early last year but we are pretty lazy and never really go down to Pacific Beach so it’s been on the backburner. There was no stopping us now, though, because we were hungry and in the mindset for trying something new. Colleen “kinda” knew where it was but she was slightly off so we almost got lost. I was in the midst of getting the location from GOOG-411 when we happened upon the restaurant. There was just one tiny problem: IT WAS CLOSED! It was during their normal operating hours during lunchtime on a Saturday and there was no indication of why they wouldn’t be open but sure enough, IT WAS CLOSED. I don’t want to say that they “lost some potential customers” but we definitely have soured on going there. C’est la vie.

By the time that we were rejected there, I was hungry, tired and cranky and just wanted to go home. Colleen tried finding another vegan place in PB but I just kept shooting her ideas down (note to self: look at review for Synergy Raw Cafe). We were nearly home when she took a detour and we made our way to Grillions instead. Long story short, we were both—well, I should say she was—pretty disappointed by the food there.

Sunday was the Super Bowl and I had some vague plans to make a lot of snacky type foods for the big game but they never really materialized. I did make some spinach dip and french bread before the game but the feast came after the Steelers eeked out a victory. I made a double batch of Susan V’s BBQ Ribs and tried my hand at some vegan potato skins. I burnt my ribs but the skins were pretty good so I guess it was a split.

Well, I’m a bit on the tired side now so I think I’m going to call it a night. I have a couple more posts to make this week to help keep good on my resolution to write one blog post per week this year. We’ll see how that goes

- Sat

Tags: San Diego Zoo, super bowl, vegan zone, wild animal park, zoo