Road Trip 2017 - Day 5

Day 5 - Thursday 13th July

We headed out of Washington this morning to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park.  This is a free zoo just outside the center of the city and the biggest draw in this zoo is the pandas.  We headed there first and found the pandas inside (well it was pretty warm outside the air conditioning felt good to me too and I didn't have a fur coat on).

We tried to check out the 2 toed sloths, but this is all we were able to see..

The elephants were not really doing much!

But we sat and watched the orangutans for quite some time.   This zoo has what they call and O line - which is a overhead wire that the orangutans are able to move along to get from one side of the zoo to the othe, but unfortunately they were all inside today too - that's what happens when you go to the zoo on a 95F day.

after another picnic lunch at the zoo we drove to nearby Gaithersburg and checked into the Hilton (since when is the Hilton the cheapest hotel in town?)  The only problem was that for some reason this hotel didn't open it's pool until 5pm, so we relaxed until then, swam, then found a local Thai restaurant for dinner.