We were in a car driving through the streets of Sacramento trying to find a way to the zoo. We were heading to the zoo after hours for a school field trip. We found the back entrance that leads into the zoo and pulled our car into the line. We waited for about 10 minutes until we got in and parked our car. We grabbed our gear out of the car and brought it to the place that we were camping out for the night. 

We tried to set up our tents but then we kept doing it wrong.

“Andy we have to flip the poles so it fits the design,” said Joey. We flipped the poles and the tent worked perfectly. We put all our supplies in the tent and set up our sleeping stuff. After we set up all our stuff we headed to the outdoor theater so we could get a schedule for the night. The person up on the stage was talking about all the rules and what we would be seeing that night.

Me, Andy, and Timmy were all walking around the zoo with our parent chaperone. We see a sign with an arrow that says red pandas so we start running that way to see them.

“I love red pandas,” said Joey.

We got to some more signs but they didn’t say red pandas on any of them. And we knew we hadn’t passed them yet. We all didn’t know where they were or if they had them at all. Then we saw one of our friends run  from one of the passageways and said that there’s red pandas over there.

Me, Andy, and Timmy started running over there to see it. We get to the enclosure and see how cute the red panda was.

“Aww, they’re so cute,” said Joey.

We all stared at the red panda and all of its cuteness. I stayed there for a good 10 minutes watching the red panda rome in its enclosure. I didn’t want to leave the red panda but I knew we had to explore the rest of the zoo and see other animals.

I started to walk away from the red panda enclosure and went to see the rest of the zoo. We started to walk towards the lions to see what they were up to. I was really excited to go see all the other animals and to learn new things about them. On our way over to the Lions we heard them roaring and that got me really excited. We got to some of the glass windows and then we saw a snow leopard in one of the windows. It was really cool. It was a tannish brown color with black spots all over it and a really long tail.

But we all wanted to see the lions so we kept going and then in the next window over we saw two capybaras. We stopped to look at them for a minute. They were about the size of a big dog. They also had pretty short tails. But we all were determined to see the lions so we went one more window over and then we saw a big male lion next to a female lion. I was amazed at the size of the lions. They were about double the size of me. There was a double-decker platform and both lions were on the top platform of it lying side by side. On the bottom platform it looked like there was an animal bone. On the far right side of it there was this passageway that led into the other side of the enclosure. The other side of the enclosure was more of a jungle theme.

But neither of the lions were on that side. We decided to move on after about 15 minutes of watching the lions to go see other animals. We moved down the passageway until we saw some giraffes. Some of the giraffes were at least 24 feet tall at the minimum. We watched them eat the leaves up in the tall trees and walk around and play. There was this one giraffe that was playing with balls that were hanging from a rope, it was headbutting it with its head. We kept walking and then after a little bit more walking we saw these monkeys swinging across their habitat. They were pretty small monkeys. They’re still interesting watching them swing around.

Right next to the monkeys was this alligator exhibit. We started to walk around trying to find it. After a second of looking we found the alligator sunning itself in some sand. We were watching the alligator for a little while just studying what it looked like. It was dark green and scaly with a triangle head. We walked back to where we started in the zoo to see if we could find the flamingo exhibit except the flamingos were all gone in the pond but it was drained. We found this glass window that looked into the Jaguar exhibit. It was pacing across the window like it was hungry or nervous. I was watching it with a curious look on my face trying to find out what it wanted. 

Then we went to take a look at the kangaroo exhibit to find out what they were doing. They were hopping around playing with each other. And for some reason there was an emu in the cage with them. It was cool watching the kangaroos hop and the emu running around. I was watching the kangaroos with my friends and we were watching how they hopped and how easily they could hop. We all wished that we could hop like that. I knew that that would never be possible so we were just watching the emu and wondering why it was in the kangaroo cage. And right next to it was a really big tortoise that was slowly eating lettuce and walking around. It was the biggest tortoise that I’ve ever seen. It was 270 lb and around 2 ft tall. And on the other side of the kangaroo exhibit they were working on building a rhino exhibit. I wish there was a rhino in it then so I could see what they looked like in person.

I was wondering how big a rhino would look in that pretty small exhibit. But in around 5 minutes the person that was hosting us was going to be feeding the giraffes and telling us about them so we started to walk over to the giraffe exhibit. When we got there they were giving out pizza or popcorn so I grabbed a piece of Pepperoni pizza and walked up to the platforms to watch her feed them. I got up there but there were already a lot of kids up there so I moved positions down onto the ramp that leads up to it and a few of my friends were already down there. So we were just talking and messing around while she was feeding the giraffes and telling us about them.

After everybody grabs something from the pizza or popcorn piles they said we could grab another thing so I went down and grabbed another pizza. They were small slices so I knew I could eat a lot but they didn’t have enough so I could only grab one more piece. After that it was getting close to the time that we had to head back to our tents so we started to walk back there slowly while looking at all the other things but on our way back we decided to stop at the park for a few minutes and mess around. We started to play tag and jump off all the small sculptures. Well then after that we started to head back again but then we got distracted by the hurricane machine. Me and a lot of other people crammed ourselves into it and then one of the parents chaperones put $3 into it and the wind started kicking up. The wind got up to 75 miles per hour and it got really windy and really loud. 

But then we really had to get back to our tents before we gone trouble by all the teachers. But when we got back to our tents we had to head over to the theater so we could get more information about some of the animals that we saw today. While in the theater the person that was hosting us brought out three different animals and one of them was a gray horned owl, another one was a turtle, and then the third one was a 7 ft long boa. They were really cool except the boa couldn’t leave its bucket because it was cold outside and boa constrictors like warm weather so it was in a bucket on a heating pad.  

The person that was hosting us said lights out at 10:30 everybody started cheering because that was pretty late for a field trip. Everybody was just out of their tents running around. Timmy and I kept trying to scare people behind the bathroom. Since it’s really dark back there and we’re both wearing all black clothes so we blended in perfectly. We tried many many times except nobody got scared. But we didn’t give up, we kept trying to scare people for a good hour. But then all the parents chaperones asked us to go to bed so that’s what we had to do. We got into our tent and me, Timmy, and Andy started talking for another hour or so. But then we all closed our eyes and fell asleep. 

We woke up at 6:30 a.m. and took down the tent. We went to the theater to grab some breakfast. The breakfast was two different bars, an applesauce, and some hot coco. After breakfast the host opened the reptile house for us to go through. After I finished breakfast with a few other friends we went to the reptile house to take a walk through. There were so many animals in the reptile house. My three favorite ones were the rattlesnake, the axolotl, and the iguana. We all wanted to see the reptile house again so we looped around and walked through it again. By the time we finished it was around 7:30. But then the host gave us a tour through some animals. Since we spent the night we got a tour through the zoo before hours so we couldn’t be there that much longer and we couldn’t tore through the entire zoo because there were some zoo workers there getting the zoo ready to open.

So we just went through the main parts like where the lions are, capybaras, and snow leopards, and saw some different kinds of monkeys that I didn’t see the day before. They were really cool. And one of the monkeys was really big. Then I finally saw the otters because I couldn’t find them yesterday. There were two different otters. One had a lot of fur and then the other one didn’t have as much fur. It was really fun watching the otters play in the water. One of them even went into the hammock that was there. While I was watching the otters mess around we were offered some snacks for the car ride back to Truckee. We started to walk around where all the cars were parked trying to find our parent chaperones and the rest of our group. After a few minutes of walking around we found our parent chaperone and we finished putting all our gear in the car and then we loaded ourselves in and took off. 

After about an hour of driving we stopped to get breakfast at a bagel place. I got a plain bagel with jalapeno cream cheese. It was really good. Timmy was so tired from the other day that he just stayed in the car and laid down. Well everybody was eating their bagels and we started telling riddles to each other. But there was this one riddle that nobody could solve. We all thought about it for a good 15 or 20 minutes but we still couldn’t think of an answer. And the person that told us the riddle didn’t even know the answer. The riddle was there’s a huge storm behind you and you’re running across this path, there’s a split in the road and there’s two girls and a house, one tells the truth and one tells a lie which one do you ask to tell you the correct path, and you could only ask one question. It was a really hard riddle. But we still had a car ride to get back to so we loaded back into the car after we finished our bagels and we started the long car ride back to school.