I grew up going to the San Diego Zoo. As zoo s go,...

I grew up going to the San Diego Zoo. As zoo s go, I m not a fan of seeing wild animals in captivity. We had family in town and our nieces really wanted to go. We took the trek from Los Angeles to San Diego, one of the hottest days of the summer.. we took advantage of the safari tour bus to get the overview of the park, as it is huge! I would very much suggest doing that, and then you can plan the exhibits you want to go see more of. Hands down, San Diego Zoo is the best zoo I ve been to. The elephant exhibit was one I was looking forward too most. I must say I was disappointed. I expected them to have a more natural habitat, that s what they have always strived for. They had huge showers and holding areas for them and I m sure they are well taken care of- less cement and more vegetation would be nice to see. The living desert museum in Palm Desert did it right in their Safari Exhibit. Unfortunately, there was a power outage due to the extreme heat- all of Balboa Park, (surrounding area) was out of power. This happened around 2:00 pm. None of the vendors we tried to get water and cold drinks from were set up to do manual sales. I find that unfathomable. How do you have over a 100 acre park and not be able to offer your paying guests cold water in the sweltering heat? They were guesstimating that they would have power back by 3:30pm. Good thing we had an ice chest in the car with cold drinks and sandwiches. We planned one meal in the park and lunch in the picnic area- instead, we cut our visit short and tailgated in the parking lot eating our lunch as we couldn t find the picnic area. We saw it as we were driving out. We spent 5 hours driving and hundreds of $ for our large family to spend the day at the zoo, that ended up being maybe a three hour visit. Instead, we took the family home and let the kids go swimming to salvage the last day they had in their vacation. Not being set up for manual sales is the reason for the 4 stars. San Diego Zoo, I hope you read this and take note...