Some of my favorite memories with my husband while traveling have been at parks. What’s not to love about the fresh air, the open space and the wild life? Although we stayed downtown, we made a stop at Central Park to explore.
We just happened to enter the park near the Central Park Zoo. From the benches surrounding the zoo, watching the sealions inside, we decided to make an unscheduled visit.
The Central Park Zoo is relatively small. There was a polar bear death in August and so there were still no polar bears on display during our visit. This made the zoo even smaller.
But they do have plenty of birds, the sealions plus some snow monkeys from Japan, red pandas and a difficult to spot snow leopard. There’s not a lot to see but it’s a nice couple of hours.
The park itself wasn’t what I expected. It was full of huge boulders protruding from the ground and tourists climbing wildly all over them. While we sat on a bench along a main path, people busked. Caricature artists, men creating bubbles for children, tables selling postcards and posters. It was quite unlike any park I had been to.
But the foliage, slowly turning to oranges and reds and dropping to the ground, made for a lovely setting. There’s so much to explore in Central Park. It’s hard to imagine how long it could take.
