Sunday

Today we found ourselves venturing to the opposite side of San Francisco. Specifically, to Golden Gate Park. After taking the bus to the entrance of the park, we walked until we found the conservatory. As my friend Dustin stated while eating last night, the park is way bigger than you'd think it is. We did quite a bit of walking today. The picture is from the conservatory and was, if we remember correctly, a "double coconut." I'll leave it at that and move on to the next picture.

The flowers on the slope in front of the conservatory spelled out "San Francisco Recreation & Parks." Everything was green there! And smelled like living things!

The conservatory had a couple of different sections of different types of plants. This is a picture of some of the aquatic plants they had. There were also turtles in the pond, fish, and some really cool plants!

After the Conservatory we made our way to the Japanese tea garden. Everyone ahead of us had to answer a riddle to pass but I massaged the thorn in his paw and he let us go without any of the riddle nonsense. This was in front of the art museum while on the way to the garden.

Beautiful! The Japanese garden was really neat. We jumped into a free guided tour and the guide explained a lot of the design and architecture of the garden to us. When someone explains the choices of plants, rocks, etc. it really makes you appreciate the amount of work that goes into creating this type of garden. It was also interesting that the garden was started around 100 years ago by a Japanese immigrant but he and his family were put into internment camps during WWII.

Pretty flowers at the entrance of the park! We jumped into the tour group so we actually looked at the first section of the garden last due to missing out on that portion with the group.

After the Japanese garden we made our way to the Academy of Science. Inside they had exhibits about climate change, evolution, swamps with swamp animals, aquariums, a planetarium, and a man made rain forest with all kinds of different creatures. The rain forest actually had butterflies and birds flying around. No nets or screens or anything. They would fly right past you. Really cool! This is a picture of two sting rays in one of the "pools." They were in training for the Olympics. Michael Phelps will finally have some competition. Even if they aren't fast they can stab him with the stinger thingy and win the cheap way.

This was part of the rain forest portion. It spiraled up about 3 stories from the ground level "swampiness" all the way to the canopy. Really pretty neat!

This was from the underwater aquarium portion. Similar to the aquarium we went to a couple of days ago in Fisherman's Wharf but I thought this one was more "sciencey." The other one seemed more "touristy." Just my opinion. This picture shows Kelsey making a new friend. Oh, I should clarify that Kelsey is on the left.