Sleeping Under The Whale

"A museum is a place where one should lose one's head." --Renzo Piano


Several weeks ago my boyfriend's, Will, mom (Bridget)  surprised us with overnight tickets to none other than the Night At The Museum! Yes, the first thing that popped into my head was the movie and visions of myself running amok with a t-rex and an Easter Island head while saving the world in one night. While my night was fantastic and full of wonder, it wasn't quite that epic. She had snagged tickets to the night at the museum event for kids and adults on Halloween of all nights!

I'm getting ahead of myself. We live in Virginia Beach. New York City's American Museum of Natural History is a 7 hour drive. Yes. We drove a total of 14 hours in 2 days. Yes, it was worth it. Will and I hopped into the car armed with music, games, and excitement! After being in the car for 2 hours we were already ready to get out of the car. Luckily at hour 4 we stopped for lunch at a cute diner and were able to ease the sense of cabin fever. Both Will and I are very active people so being stuck in a car together just builds up dormant energy waiting to be released in a nuclear type of way. Needless to say by the time we reached the city we were ready to get out of the car.

Life had a different idea for us. Our gps maps app on our phones took us to the heart of Brooklyn instead of NYC. We had a fantastic car tour of Brooklyn where we realized that it has a population consisting of 99.9% Jewish community. It was odd to look around and expect to find typical New Yorkers and find adults and children alike in suits, ties, dresses, and yamakas. While it is typical to accidentally end up in China town or Little Italy while in New York, ending up in Little Israel while unexpected, but quite delightful! It was by far the cleanest part of NY we had ever seen as well as a very unstressful drive.

We finally found the museum and descended to the depths of the parking garage that lies beneath the museum. After being ushered into the building sleeping bags in hand we were assigned our cots. WE WERE SLEEPING IN THE OCEAN LIFE HALL. UNDER THE WHALE.  Now I'm a scuba diver and have always loved the water. Not to mention the fact that I get giddy when talking about sharks, so you can imagine how happy I was to be sleeping in an aquarium of sorts.

Lots and lots of events were planned although many were geared more towards the kids. All of us, Will, Bridget and I, set off to explore! First stop was the insect hall! We got to see, but unfortunately not touch lots of creepy crawlies like tarantulas. They had some pretty neat replicas of ancient mosquitos and other giant insects from the past.

My favorite part of exploring was the Halloween themed trek through the dinosaur hall. The lights were deliberately turned off and the fossils were lit up by multi colored lights to give an eerie glow to the dinosaurs. The dinosaur halls have always been my favorite part of any museum, so to explore one in a new way was quite the adventure for me!

After visiting the dinosaur hall we headed to the featured Pterosaur exhibit. A pterosaur is a dinosaur of flight of varying sizes. They had tons of super detailed fossils, which were really neat to look at. My favorite part was by far the interactive zone. You got to stand on a simulator and act like you were flying and your movements were projected on to a screen as a pterosaur hunting for fish. I was AWFUL at it, but I eventually caught a fish! I would have no doubt been Darwined out way back when and died of starvation, but luckily I'm a Homo sapien. Moving on.

At this point we realized we were way older than we thought because we were 100% exhausted and it was only 10pm. We tried to sit through Hotel Transylvania playing in the Imax theater, but started to drift off before the movie even started. On our walk back to our cots we realized that we weren't quite as ancient as the parents there. You could tell who had more kids by the level of defeated looks and hopeless looks in their eyes as you could tell all they wanted to do was convince their kids it would be fun to take a nap, but they knew that was about as fruitless as training a fish to climb a tree.

We made a sort of sport watching the Dads try to herd their kids to bed around 1130 while we were laying in bed nice and cozy and warm without screaming kids to bother us! Notice I said Dads. You know all of the wives suckered their husbands into a night at the museum convincing them it would be easy while they had a night off and drank wine and laughed with their friends at what they thought their husbands were going through.

Our only regret was that we could not find the King Tut exhibit. Our theory is that it was on tour when we were there. Obviously this means we have to go back and see it! One thing I almost forgot. There were over 400 people in the museum that night, but we never felt crowded. More often than not we found ourselves the only people in several of the halls. With free reign of the entire museum we expected to be jostled around like during the day. We were pleasantly surprised to find that we could casually explore and stop at our leisure without feeling like we were being pressured to move. That was one of our favorite parts of the entire visit. A thing such as that is rare in today's world.

Although our time in NYC was very short and jam packed with non-stop action and exploring we were ready to go home. Sayonara NYC! Hopefully we will see you again soon for a more relaxing, but adventurous vacation!

"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world." --Edmond de Goncourt

Yorvik!

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

6am wake up calls should be banned. As should morning people. I found myself at 6am brutally awakened by my alarm that I still think sounds like a really bad 80s porno. Everyone has agreed with me and no I can't change it because believe it or not the other ringtones are worse... ANYWAYS, my Dad and I trekked to York to do some exploring. York Minster was the first thing I saw after getting off the train so i was excited to see that. However, we had to take a 45 minute detour to Dad's hotel where he checked his emails and took a painfully long time. Once we finally got outside it rained... BUT we got to see this:

My Dad has always wanted a stained glass copy of one of the wrens depicted on the stained glass windows in the private prayer room. My Dad being the rebel that he is defied the "rules" (they're more like suggestions anyways) and lucked out by having the room to himself with me as his lookout. He then took AGES taking picture of each bird there... There had to be over 40. Needless to say I was slightly bored, but amused at the same time. 

We then climbed all 257 steps to the top of the tower while squeezing through the winding staircase that was just big enough for me. Again I heard more grumbles about exercising. Once at the top there were great views, cold winds, and no rain! 

We met up for lunch with Jo and Phil, who are long time friends of the family. York was having its first ever chocolate festival. I tore through there like a tornado in a trailer park. Just picture a kid in a candy shop where all the chocolate is free and there's no parents to restrict how much you buy. That was me. 

I also saw Guy Fawkes's birthplace, a pastry called a fat rascal and the Merchant Adventurer's museum where my Dad showed an undying love for beams... it was practically heaven for him. It was a pretty interesting morning for me. The next thing we visited was the Jorvik Viking Museum. This is a very creative place where they recreated smells so you could experience how AWFUL York used to smell... thank goodness hygiene standards have been raised. The museum was creative and I was definitely impressed. They recreated the archaeological dig so when you first walked in you were walking on glass overlooking the "original" dig site. There was also a ride taking you through what it would have been like to live in the past. They ended it in a lovely way. There was a robotic man behind a stick fence having a poo. Classy, so of course I loved it and laughed obnoxiously to the disgust of the woman sitting in front of me trying to get her children to look in the opposite direction. To my dismay I learned there were 250,000 ... wait for it... cue the dramatic music... DUN DUN DUN... OYSTERS found at a part of the site. To my further dismay and slight depression I saw oysters and picked them up and was asked about them... I just can't escape.

Meanwhile at the Yorkshire museum I reverted back to the little kid in me. I discovered I weigh slightly more than a Hypsilophodon, but my Dad is almost as heavy as a velociraptor.  Proof: 

 I also had the pleasure of seeing a dodo bird skeleton, more viking helmets, and other dinosaurs. I had the pleasure of learning that bees have hairy eyeballs, rhinos poop their body weight every 48 hours (that's a lot of poop), and people used to eat lady bugs because they thought the poison would cure headaches.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." --Oscar Wilde