Brewers - Tigers

We didn't celebrate Tessie's birthday with just cupcakes and a haircut, of course. That was just Day One of Tessie's Birthday Festival. (Despite the title of this post, though, we didn't follow up with a baseball game.)

The morning after her actual birthday, we piled into the car and set out. First stop? A brewery. Stone Brewing in Escondido, CA, to be precise. O.K., so Tessie still has 18 years to go before she can get any enjoyment out of that, but we took the tour anyway. Standard stuff, but mixed with Stone's own particular attitude. The beers are fine, but they try a bit too hard to be outrageous, with brews named "Arrogant Bastard Ale" and "Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale," and they push their recipes to the limit, confronting your palate with an overload of hops, or bitterness, or both, simply because they can and brag about it later. They seem to view brewing as an extreme sport.

We also had a snack in their outrageously expensive restaurant. Two appetizers + two beers + milk for Tessie + tip = over $40.00! Yikes!

These fermentation vessels, if I am remembering this correctly, hold 12,500 gallons each. Our tour guide made that somewhat more comprehensible: if you wanted to drink one dry, that would mean drinking a six-pack worth of beer every night for 65 years.


Anyway, that's not why we went to Escondido. The real object of out visit was to take Tessie to see her favorite animal, the tiger. (Tiger starts with T, Tessie starts with T. We're pretty sure that's why.) So we got ourselves memberships in the San Diego Zoological Society. We'll certainly be visiting their famous Zoo at some point, but this trip was to their slightly less famous Wild Animal Park.

Begun as a breeding facility serving the zoo, the park opened to the public in 1972 as an attraction in its own right. The animals there are mostly African species, like these elephants:

There's also a petting zoo. Tessie likes petting zoos:

Most of the animals are large enough that they require lots of area to roam. There's a tram ride called the "Journey Into Africa" that carries visitors around the otherwise inaccessible parts of the park to view the larger animals. Here Tessie is waving to a giraffe:

We could have taken the hot-air balloon ride, but weren't quite sure how Tessie would react. We also saw "Dino Mountain," an assortment of foam-rubber animatronic dinosaurs that Tessie seemed to enjoy, especially the one that spat water at us.

There are tigers as well, in the Asian animals area. Regrettably, they were so far back in their enclosure, and so well hidden in the shade, that we're not sure Tessie actually saw them. So we made sure she got a close-up look at one:

She seemed satisfied with that, just as she seemed to enjoy the whole trip. Her favorite part was feeding the ducks in the park's central lagoon. Don't worry - there is extensive video, which will be shared soon.