One of the highlights of our trip to Cleveland for the Season 2 premiere of Hot in Cleveland was a personal tour of the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Surrounded by a neighborhood of tidy homes, the Zoo consists of 183 rolling, wooded acres with RainForest, Australian Adventure, Wolf Wilderness, and African Savanna environments - plus so much more. 

With Andi Kornak, the Zoo's curator of carnivores and large mammals, and Sue Allen, marketing and communications manager, serving as our personal guides, our family started out by visiting two of the Zoo's newest residents - Lovato and Tebogo - the female and male meerkats named by the Hot in Cleveland cast! The meerkats live in the brand new African Elephant Crossing habitat which opened on May 5. Andi kindly offered to let us feed the meerkats to entice them out of their burrows... Feeding the animals at the Zoo - How cool is that? I couldn't wait to get my hands on some meerkat snacks, until Andi opened a tin of creepy, crawly mealworms. Yuck!

Lovato and Tebogo lived up to their names: They LOVED the mealworms and showed their THANKS by scurrying around their habitat, popping up to stand sentry while each enjoyed its share of the treats, and generally frolicking and playing, much to our delight.

We toured inside the elephant house, where 10 of us crowded on to the elephant scale - and we didn't even crack 2,000 pounds, less than one-third the weight of Moshi, the lightest member of the herd at 7,745 pounds! African Elephant Crossing provides 5 acres of territory for the elephants to roam and explore, and it follows their natural migratory instincts by allowing them to "cross" from one section of the habitat to another, symbolizing how elephants and humans cross paths throughout the world.

Andi explained that, like people, animals at the Zoo need intellectual activity and physical training to stay healthy and alert - and believe it or not, some of these animals, like the Western Gorillas have to have their weight monitored to prevent obesity. To that end, the Zoo has moved the gorillas away from a diet of processed biscuits and toward healthy, leafy vegetables. Portion control - in the wild and in our kitchens!

We arrived early in the morning for our tour so we could interact with the animals before the crowds came, and we got to go "backstage" into the tiger area to see these majestic cats before they left their sleeping pens to roam their habitat. 

Another memorable opportunity came when Andi led us into the rhinoceros corral, allowing us to feed Inge, the female rhino and her 600-pound "baby" Johari. When we arrived, Johari was quietly nursing - but she and Inge perked up when we showed them some tasty hazelnut leaves (which seemed much more appetizing than the meerkats' mealworms!) These gentle giants lumbered to the gates and let us scratch their cheeks. Their soft lips nuzzled our hands to grab more leaves - but ever-so-gently. It was startling that such a large animal could be so sweet. The Cleveland Metroparks Zoo recently sent one of its rhinos on loan to another zoo: Who knew you could FedEx a rhinoceros?

Check out the photo album of our zoo adventure!

After the rhinos, I didn't think it could get any better, but then we went to the koala habitat at GumLeaf Hideout, where I got to hold a baby koala. With Tom, the kids, my parents, my brother and sister-in-law, we had quite a group, and Sue instructed us to stay very quiet and still so as not to stress the koalas - one of which was incubating a joey in her pouch. You have to hold koalas very carefully, because even though their fur is soft like lamb's wool, they have pretty sharp claws to climb trees and forage for eucalyptus, which is flown in to the Cleveland Zoo from farms in Arizona and Florida. My co-star Betty White had toured the Zoo earlier in the week, and the baby koala started to whine when her keeper tried to take her away from Betty and place her back with her mother in the tree! I, on the other hand, got a tiny scratch on my face from the baby koala. Betty is the animal whisperer. Me? Not so much - but I was still honored to hold that sweet baby.

We then traveled to the giraffe habitat, where we were able to feed the very friendly - and somewhat pushy - Travis. As we stood on an observation deck overlooking their environment, Andi explained that giraffes have the same number of bones in their necks as humans do - they're just bigger, MUCH bigger. Travis wasn't afraid to stick his neck out, nosing his way into our family photos, and he wasn't shy at all about taking branches from our hands!

From visiting the new African Elephant Crossing to holding a baby koala to feeding the giraffes to petting a rhino to watching a three-toed sloth move in a very un-slothlike manner, our day at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo gave our family a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about these exotic animals, and it gave us greater appreciation for the important conservation and preservation work that zoos are conducting all over the country. I want to thank the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo for a wonderful experience - and I encourage you to visit on your next trip to Ohio!