Trip to Bellingham: Day 1

This weekend Rachel and I went to Bellingham, WA. Rachel's brother just had a baby girl and we went up to meet her and go for her baby blessing. We left on Friday morning and had to get up at 4:30am which was something I was not looking forward, but I didn't fight it much when the time actually came. We left out of Long Beach and were on the same flight with her brother Mike and his family. We had planned our trip perfectly because after checking are bags, getting our board passes and going through all the security checkpoints they were in the middle of boarding our flight. We arrived in Seattle around 9:30 and Rachel's parents meet us at the airport. They had rented a van for all of us to share and we planned to spend the day in Seattle before going up to Bellingham which is about 2 hours north of Seattle. We had planned to meet up with Eric and his family (the brother we came to see) and spend the day at the zoo. It was a very cute zoo but the design of it was planned very poorly even the parking lots (plural) were strangely too small to accomodate a decent amout of cars. After we parked and met up with Eric at the entrance their was a slight panic as to where Brian, his oldest son was. We spent about 20 minutes trying to find him but Eric finally found found him. Somehow, he had ended up inside the park. After we had everyone we finally went inside.

Most of us were starving since we had been up since 4:30 and only had airplane food which for me was a sprite and bag of blue kettle chips. We looked at the penguins near the entrance and afterwards went to the food court area to eat. It was very packed at the zoo for a friday. The general consensus for the crowdedness was because it was the first sunny day in the area for a while. I had always heard that it was always dark and rainy in Seattle but I always thought it was just an exaggeration but apparently its the truth. Don't get me wrong its very beautiful but it was very cold and dreary during the majority of the trip.

I really liked that a lot of the animals at zoo were out and about. Usually when I go they're sleeping or in their little caves hiding from the crowds. The gorilla exhibit was especially cool. I didn't know gorillas climbed trees I always thought they stayed on the ground but these ones were up high in there tree/trapeze structure:

There was also this one that was just hanging out and eating right in front of everyone.

I didn't get any other pics of the animals except for this girafee which was cool. I've been having issues with my camera phone and a lot of the pics came out out of focus and blurry so I didn't get as many as I really wanted.

There was also a big carousel that the all kids went on which was cute to see them get all excited.

After the zoo we had some issues navigating to get to the freeway to get up to Bellingham. We eventually found our way thanks to modern technology aka our matching EVO smart phones. We rested for a little bit at our hotel and went out to dinner to Red Robin which everyone which was delicious after a long day.