On my last day of spring vacation we decided to go to the Wild Animal Park. It was a great time to go. Hardly anyone was there since it was a Tuesday morning and most schools are already back in session. So we had the whole place mostly to ourselves.

The zoo and the Wild Animal Park are great places to bring our new camera. I may as well mention, for the curious, that it is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. The killer feature on this camera is the lens. Most standard digital cameras zoom in about 3x (including all the cameras we've owned before). But our new camera can zoom in a whopping 18x.

Here's a sample I took at the Wild Animal Park to show the kind of zoom-in you can get. The first shot is from a new balcony they just put up at the Park. This is no zoom.

And here is a picture from the exact same spot zoomed in 18x.

How cool is that! There is no cropping at all here. Just pure zoomage. Although I did shrink the size of the images way down so they would fit on our website. For those who can't spot it, the rock with the lions on it is just left of center in the first image.

The camera also came in handy when Chloe suddenly disappeared near the gorilla exhibit. That girl is always exploring and going places we wouldn't expect. Take a look at what happened!

Do you see her? Here's a cropped in look.

Thankfully we noticed her before Naninda the Gorilla did.

[Okay, that last part didn't really happen.]