Z is for Zoo #AtoZChallenge

Last one! I hope you've enjoyed this little glimpse of Cincinnati with me. My favourite thing about this series has been all the locals who've read a post or two and then told me their personal histories with the things I wrote about. And the folks who, having read about one thing, asked if I'd been to another. And the ones who've filled in the gaps left after I read the info available on Wikipedia. Maybe the kindest thing I heard was from a coworker who said, "It's been fun rediscovering Cincinnati through your eyes." And that is, indeed, the most I could possibly have hoped for.

So! The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. You've probably heard of it. (And if you're not following the updates on Fiona the baby hippo, you're wrong.) As with many other posts in this series, I didn't go inside, but instead took a few pics of the entrance. And attracted the attention of a couple Zoo employees, who probably wondered what the heck I was doing. C'est la vie here in Su-Land.

The Zoo opened in 1875 and is the second-oldest zoo in the U.S. One of the original buildings still stands (it's the Reptile Building now), and is the oldest zoo building in the U.S. Admission on opening day was 25¢ for adults and 15¢ for children. I believe it's gone up a bit since then.

This historic entrance has an elevator inside, so colour me skeptical.
Also, at what point do you change your sign to read "Historic Entrance"
instead of just "entrance"? There have to be data on that.

The Zoo's first guidebook was printed in 1876 in German, because that's what a sizeable portion of the population at the time spoke, with the English guide coming in 1893. Clearly, the English-speaking folks weren't in too much of a hurry to print a guidebook.

Bike parking: approved.

Red Bike kiosk: thumbs up. Although riding one of these heavy bikes
back up the hill from here towards the University area cannot be pleasant.
Unless the rider has legs of steel, I suppose.  There are a couple more stations
further north than this one, but once you're at the Zoo you're closing in on
 the northern edge of the Red Bikes system.

Bike rack shaped like a snake: thumbs way up. I love it.
Not pictured: the Zoo is served by two local bus routes.
Public transit: also approved.

I'm not normally one to get excited by car parking, because why would I?, but this is pretty cool. The Zoo parking lot has solar panels on the covered parking roofs that provide 20% of the Zoo's energy annually. There was another sign describing it as a "demonstration project," but at that point the zoo dude was staring at me pretty intensely so I decided to skip that one and move on.

Sign describing the project + panels as seen from the pedestrian overpass.

I will probably save any actual visiting the Zoo for such a time as my sister comes to visit, because of the two of us, she's more of the Zoo one. (I'm the libraries and museums one.)

Plants at the entrance. As you can plainly see, this is the tulips' way of
telling me I should have come by a bit sooner.

And that, my friends, is the 2017 A to Z Challenge. Tomorrow I'll resume my usual nonsense. See you then.