Sunday, December 21, 2008

Wild Animal Park Festival of Lights

Last Friday we met up with our friends Tonya, Jayden, Marisol and Flynn for the Festival of Lights at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. This year marks the 20th and final year of the festival. Next year it will be moved to the San Diego Zoo under the name Jungle Bells. The festival runs until January 3rd so if you are in the area, check it out and be a part of the final festival.

Once night falls the park is transformed with holiday lights, craft activities for the kids, a holiday light show, black light puppet theater, a snow hill, and animal presentations. Oh and of course, lets not forget Santa!  I managed to get my kids to pose with Santa by having them sit on my lap and then the ever so clever Santa snuck in behind me and smiled. Hey- you take what you can get with two year olds.  A note of warning- after the lights go down, most of the animals go to sleep so if you want to get your fill of animal fun, come before the sun sets and then plan on staying late for the lights. We have a season pass ( a dream of mine since I was a child) so we just came for the lights and all we ended up seeing was an opossum. Not that the kids seemed to mind. They were happy to be running about with their friends, taking in all the beautiful scenery.  Oh and if all of this wasn't enough to make you want to come out and enjoy the park, here is my final selling point: they have hot chocolate with Bailey's. Yummy!

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Disneyland with Chrissy Dec1

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7 comments:

Tonya Staab said...

OMG you got so many cute shots. Your Santa one turned out so much better than ours. I have a shot I'll send you of Paul getting his hand painted too.

debi9kids said...

Looks like a great time Shar! I remember when Tonya went last year (I think) and the lights there are just so pretty.

Glad you were able to get a cute pic with Santa, even if you did have to be the "decoy" LOL

Bre said...

Very cool!!! You got some great pictures. That's the benefit to warmer climate. You can do such fun stuff during the holiday season. Right now we are bunkered down and can't go anywhere due to an ice storm.....yikes!

Christy said...

Beautiful pics! Looks like so much fun!

Anonymous said...

Yea, looks like you has a great time!! We've been trying to go to the ZooLights here too, but it's been too dang cold to be walking around; even with hot cocoa and fire pits the -15F is a bit much... Hopefully it'll warm up before New Years when it ends!

Debbie Moore said...

What fun! It is so great all the fun stuff to do with the kids there!

Anonymous said...

I'm so glad you wrote this! We're going to the Wild Animal Park right after New Year's, and I'm going to show your photos to my own kids to get them excited.
:)