San Diego Safari Park

I’ve been a bit remiss about keeping current with the blog lately. We’ve been enjoying our time running around San Diego County with our cousins who have been visiting from Denmark. Last week, eleven of us loaded up in a convoy and made the drive out to the Safari Park in the hills behind Escondido to see what the animals have been up to during our absence.

Dad and Sandy are members of the “Keepers Club”, so they managed to cobble together enough free passes to get our menagerie through the gates. The park is always neat and tidy with new attractions being added all of the time. The newest is the outback area with animals from down under including kangaroos and a darkened enclosure with platypuses.

Ankle Biters!

From there, we hustled over to the cheetah run to get a good spot along the fence to see the big cats race along the grass. They hang close to their canine pals who keep them calm and act as protectors for the shy cheetahs. They are seriously fast!

Next, we took over nearly a whole car of the tram for a drive around the Savannah where all of the herbivores were allowed to roam freely together. The driver kept up a steady narration and was quick witted when anything unusual would appear to throw off her usual spiel. As she was explaining the habits of some scimitar horned antelopes, she realized that she had lost our attention because a family of local mule deer were walking inches away from our tram cars so she made a joke about the interlopers without missing a beat. It seems quite a few of the local native species slip into the park to enjoy the relative safety and free food.

The sun was setting as our tram returned from its round and the park began to clear out. Keeping 11 of us together had been working okay for most of the day but now we splintered off into smaller groups and wandered off into the dark. We regrouped outside and recapped our day before heading for home after another fun day being with family that we just don’t get to see often enough.