FAMILY VACATIONS | CALIFORNIA - Roar and s'more - Zoo sleepovers take you where the wild things are. At San Diego's Wild Animal Park, a kids-and-hot-dogs night keeps adults spellbound too. (Shhh. The lions are just

Then the unmistakable sound of a lion's roar. An angry lion.

The lion sounds close by but not as close as the snoring from the tent next door.

The first thing to know about the appropriately named "Roar and Snore" sleepover program at San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park is that very little sleeping occurs. But the morning vista from the door of our tent more than makes up for the sleepless night.

Once dawn's first light illuminates our tent, we step out onto a bluff overlooking an 88-acre African savanna teeming with gazelles, impalas, giraffes, a few rhinos and wildebeests. The morning air is cool and smells of wet grass. On a hill in the distance, a herd of Arabian oryx -- the hoofed beast believed to be the source of the unicorn myth -- grazes in spring pastures.

I've dreamed of going to Africa to see wild animals in their native habitat. But "Roar and Snore" is about as close as I'm going to get without renewing my passport.

Accompanying me on this sleepover in May are my 8-year-old daughter, Isabella, and her bubbly classmate Grace. Both girls are excited about camping in a zoo, less than a football field's distance from troops of African elephants, Sumatran tigers, African lions and curvy-horned cape buffaloes. What kid wouldn't be?

The program is understandably popular and fills up quickly on weekends and holidays, and the prices rival a stay at a mid-priced hotel ($89 to $209 depending on age, tent choice and time of year).

In Southern California, zoos, aquariums and museums began sleepover programs nearly 20 years ago to educate and entertain schoolchildren. In recent years, many programs have evolved to serve those kids' comfort-conscious parents.

We witness that at the Wild Animal Park, which recently added eight "premium" tents with queen-size platform beds, refrigerators, nightstands, a heater and a fan. At the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, the adult-only sleepover program offers guests gourmet pizza, wine, beer, yoga and meditation in the glow of a 350,000-gallon tropical aquarium.

Sleepovers have caught on elsewhere too. Two years ago, the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum launched an overnight program on the USS Midway, letting visitors doze in the same bunk beds where sailors slept in World War II and the Vietnam War.