Just a few days after returning from our trip to Utah, the kids and I were off for a fun day at part-zoo, part-aquarium, part-science museum CuriOdyssey. Some other moms we know were taking their kids there and we met up with them and met animals, had a picnic, and did science experiments.
(The coolest part for this frugal lady was that I got three free passes with my three library cards and then only paid half price for the remaining two admissions thanks to our Happy Hollow membership.)
CuriOdyssey doesn't have as many animals as your typical zoo, which made it a nice approachable size for touring with a bunch of young kids. I believe that all of the animals are native to Northern California. They are pretty much all rescue animals that because of injury or other inability cannot be released to the wild.
We loved watching the otter feeding and were delighted to learn that the male otter is named Gunner.
Otters are always a favorite of mine. They are so playful and such fun to watch.
Maggie really did have a good time. She just likes to be a sour puss sometimes. It was a bit drizzly that day; maybe she wasn't liking the dampness.
I can't remember what kind of bird this is. We just happened upon some handlers who had this bird out. The one holding him was a volunteer in training. He's a beauty.
We also got to see the bobcats being fed. There were two that had been rescued and brought there for rehabilitation. I know that one of them was so ill that some motorists found it just lying in the sun along a roadway and were worried that it would get hit by a car. After being nursed back to health, it was too imprinted on people to be able to hunt and take care of itself in the wild.
I always feel a little bad for animals in zoos, especially large predators, because surely they'd rather be out in the wild hunting. So, seeing that these bobcats' inability to hunt was a result of being rescued from an imminent death....it kind of makes it okay. Does that make sense?
Maggie's a bit more interested in the bobcats, I guess.
Holly's just cute. (She liked the animals, too.)
After checking out all the animals we went inside to see the science displays. The kids LOVED this first one. There's a fan blowing air up the clear tube. There are openings at the bottom where you could insert small foam pieces that would then be blown up into the air. It looked like the foam pieces were cut from pool noodles, but there were also narrower tubes that could be inserted into holes in the sides of the larger cylinders so that you could connect several pieces of foam and make different shapes and experiment with how different shapes traveled in the airflow.
I think that the kids stayed at this thing for more than 30 minutes. I seriously want to build one at our house.
This was kind of like some Rube Goldberg machine or giant marble roller coaster. I believe that Adah is turning a crank that influenced the movement.
This was another machine that demonstrated all different kinds of gears. Kids could crank, pull, push, or otherwise manipulate something that would move the gears either around, up and down, back and forth, or in other motions to show how gears help to do work in more powerful ways.
Another highlight of the science area was an indoor beehive that was connected to the outdoors. Through the window we could see bees flying up to the side of the building and entering a tube and then coming into the glass-walled beehive where we could continue to observe them. Super-cool.
CuriOdyssey is located in San Mateo, California, and if it hadn't been such a gray drizzly day, we would have had a really spectacular view of the San Francisco Bay. This is definitely a spot we'll revisit, as CuriOdyssey is located in a large park where there's a cool playground and some great picnic spots. I'll just have to wait until we can get those free library passes again. . . .
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