Part Two of the Redick/Pickvet 10-day trip to Portland: One of the big days for us was zoo day. You see, my family is becoming quite the zoo connoisseurs. Wherever we visit, we check out the zoo. It’s sort of a given nowadays.

It was day seven of amazing weather. Eighties, sunny, bug-free, perfect. Somehow my family lucked out, getting ten straight days of awesomeness. Anyway, we headed over to the nearby Oregon Zoo, perched high in the forest of Washington Park. The 124-year-old zoo – the oldest zoo west of the Mississippi – boasts 260 species, including Asian elephants, Peruvian penguins and Arctic polar bears (who were off-duty that day).

The best part of the outing was my three-old-niece Ava, who LOVES animals. (Mostly dinosaurs, if that counts.) And she knows them all – it warms your heart watching her get so excited over everything. She hopped from exhibit to exhibit as we logged five whole hours in the park. We saw an elephant paint a picture for a family (made me think of my elephant trainer friend Karissa), fed Lorikeets nectar from paper cups, marveled at graceful underwater creatures, and ate more junk food. And after a long day at the zoo, the only logical thing was to relax with some cheap beers and jukebox tunes at Silver Dollar Pizza Sportsbar.