New York Trip - part two

Sunday

 On Sunday, we decided to take the Hop on hop off bus and went along to the Natural History Museum.

A carriage spotted on the way

Some of the sets for the Movie trilogy Night at the Museum, is based on this museum and many exterior shots are of the doors to this museum, but the resemblance is superficial.

The statue of Teddy Roosevelt outside the main entrance and he does not look a bit like Robin Williams 

The museum has a wide range of exhibits, many of which are well over 100 years old.

 Whilst the idea of stuffed animal skins is somewhat abhorrent to me, the Africa dioramas are impressive and whoever did the taxidermy was a real artist because the animals look incredibly alive.

The rest of the museum is a predictable collection of dinosaur remains articulated into life size skeletons, much loved by children of all ages.

In one gallery the centre piece is the Willamette Meteorite, a huge chunk of iron.  For me this was the highlight of the visit because it is something I have included in my U3A talks about space stuff, so I know a lot about it and I was pleased to actually see the real thing. It is impressively large and must have made a bit of a mess when it landed several thousand years ago, but as far as is known there was nobody living near at the time of its arrival.

After wandering around the museum taking in the various exhibits, we decided that we had enough time left to visit the Metropolitan Museum which is on the opposite side of Central Park, so we it would be practical and interesting to walk across the park instead of taking the bus all around it.

A remarkably tame denizen of the Central Park

An entrance was right opposite the Museum of Natural History, so we wandered into the park and quickly lost our bearings.

Central Park

Another denizen of Central Park. Same price as the call charges for using a satellite phone.

Typical view of Central Park

Looking at a map did not help a lot and in the end we decided that it would be too far to walk and made our way back to the road, where we took the hop on hop off bus again.

A Park map, not too helpful

Something I noticed whilst we were on the buses, was that many of the traffic lights were faulty.  Not enough to make them useless, but because they were made from a matrix of LEDs, it seems they must have gone for the lowest tender because quite a number of them had dud lamps in their array forming different patterns of illuminated and dark lamps.

They are supposed to be round made up from a set of concentric circles of lights, but now and then a dud lamp or three breaks the pattern

Leaving the bus we walked past the Metropolitan museum, but did not go in, deciding that there was not now enough time to do it justice, and anyway some of us were getting a bit tired by this time.  A wise decision as it turned out, because that place is VAST!.
Looking for a hop on hop off bus stop, we passed the Guggenheim Museum, a distinctive building that you could not easily mistake.

From there were were able to get a bus back to the district where our hotel was.