London Zoo Dear Zoo
Parenting

The perfect family day out to London Zoo this Easter

My daughter is a massive fan of animals. She loves them. I think that it’s something her nursery are really focusing on right now. When I take her in the morning, one of the first things she does is start to play with the toy animals, and try to imitate the noises that they make. That’s even before breakfast, and I thought breakfast was her biggest priority. So when I heard about the Dear Zoo event at London Zoo, I knew we had to go.

The classic children’s book Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell is celebrating its 35th birthday this week, and what better way to celebrate than an adventure trail around London Zoo. On arriving at the Zoo we started our day by finding out a little more about the adventure trail and picking up our adventure card. The trail is easy to complete and makes sure that you visit all areas of the zoo. There are five areas of the zoo to visit, and once you’ve visited these you place a stamp in each box, making it really fun for children of all ages. You’re not only limited to these areas, you can enjoy the full zoo experience too.

London Zoo Dear Zoo

London Zoo Dear Zoo

London Zoo Animals

We started off our visit by going to see the Monkeys to get our first stamp. Our daughter loved seeing the Monkeys swinging on the trees, and especially enjoyed seeing the baby Monkey where she proudly pointed saying “baby”.

London Zoo Monkeys

London Zoo Monkeys

Next up we took a visit to Penguin beach. This looked great and it was nice to see penguins sunbathing on the rocks and swimming in the water. I must admit that on a hot day as it was the water did look really inviting to cool off in. London Zoo also do live penguin feeding shows, and my husband and daughter caught a snippet of this later in the day.

London Zoo Penguins

London Zoo Penguins

On our way to see the Lions we wandered through the Butterfly house. This is an amazing greenhouse style environment (imagine hot and humid) with beautiful plants and full of butterflies. The butterflies are flying all around you, and it was brilliant being so close to many big and small butterflies.

London Zoo Butterflies

London Zoo Butterflies

To collect our next stamp we visited the Land of the Lions. This is an amazing set-up at London Zoo which I was really impressed with. It’s themed in an Indian Style including a train station, crumbling temple clearing, high street and guard hut taking you from London to India in a heartbeat. Surrounding the walkways you can look down into the lions dens, where we managed to see 3 lions.

London Zoo Lions

London Zoo Lions

Next up we visited the camels and tigers. Seeing such beautiful animals close up is inspiring, and it was so lovely to show our daughter the animals in real life that she has been learning about at nursery. The tigers exhibit is also pretty special too, just like the lions you are taken up on walkways to look down on them. We saw 1 tiger on our visit, who was sleeping and enjoying the sunshine, bliss!

London Zoo Camels

We spent time in the aquarium which is huge and it was fascinating seeing so many different types of fish. I think that most people were fans of the tropical fish, and our daughter enjoyed seeing the pretty colours and following the fish swimming around the tanks. It was also good fun spotting Nemo and Dory too!

London Zoo Aquarium

I really wanted to see the gorillas, and we managed to catch a glimpse of two that were sleeping. Unfortunately on our visit they were not outside, so we’ll save that one for next time, we did however manage to see a fake gorilla. Just like the Lion’s and Tiger’s exhibit, I was really impressed with the Gorilla’s exhibit with the animals having so much space to roam.

London Zoo

Once our adventure trail was complete we took our card back to the Dear Zoo shop to collect our sticker. I must also say that the shop is brilliant with all Dear Zoo merchandise, and I could have spent a small fortune here.

London Zoo Dear Zoo

London Zoo Dear Zoo

London Zoo Food and Drink

One of things I noticed at the zoo were the amount of places you could purchase food and drinks from. There’s the Terrace restaurant that serves a wide range of food for adults and kids. Here we enjoyed lunch outside overlooking the zoo in the sunshine. As well as this there are a few street-food style eateries and ice-cream vendors dotted around the park where you can grab a snack and drink, and then sit on the grass area. We enjoyed a cheeky afternoon ice-cream and beer, whilst we allowed our little one to run-around.

London Zoo

London Zoo

London Zoo child-friendly facilities

For children there is also an outdoor play park, face-painting, merry go-round and drawing in the Dear Zoo shop. So if you want a break from the animals and want to relax there is still plenty to keep the children entertained. There are also plenty of baby-change facilities and water stations dotted throughout the park. Lastly the park is 100% buggy friendly, we took our buggy around all the exhibits and had no access problems at all.

London Zoo Dear Zoo

If you’re looking for something this do this Easter, we would highly recommend a trip to the Zoo to enjoy the Dear Zoo trail. It is ideal for families, and children of any age will enjoy it, and adults too. Be quick as the Dear Zoo event is on until Monday 17th April.

London Zoo Dear Zoo

Claire x

Disclaimer: I was offered 2 adults to London Zoo in exchange for a honest review. Thank you to London Zoo for such an enjoyable day-out.

JakiJellz
Mummy in a Tutu

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