Underestimation Nation: Population Us.

Before bed last night Rebecca guaranteed me that she’d be up at 6:30am regardless of any alarms or open curtains as she had been for the past couple days. I didn’t believe her of course especially since we hadn’t managed to get out of bed any earlier than 10am and this day turned out to be no different. Still we figured that we could knock over the remaining sections of the Natural History Museum in a couple hours and then move onto one of the other museums that were close by. With that in mind we hit up a local diner for breakfast, just making it in before it was officially lunch time.

Hitting up the metro brought us right into the Natural History Museum itself, saving us the 30 minute walk that set my foot ablaze just a few days ago. Our tickets gave us access to the Journey to the Stars exhibit, basically a planetarium movie narrated by Whoopi Goldberg. We choose a session that started soon after we arrived so we could knock over the rest of the exhibits in quick succession. The show itself wasn’t too bad with the graphics and the science both been done well. The sound was perhaps a touch too loud which detracted from the experience but I still love me a good documentary about all things space and science. With that out of the way we made our way around the rest of the space exhibits, with one out of the way exhibit catching my eye:

This little rover was almost forgotten over in this lonely little corner but I had noticed it from across the room. The rest of the exhibits in this section were interesting but nothing I hadn’t seen or heard of before so we decided to make our way onto the next level. We’d already done part of this level the other day so we thought the rest wouldn’t take us too long. Probably the most memorable part of this level was the gem section with an almost unfathomable collection of precious stones on display. One of the most intriguing was the gem that had 2 security guards assigned to it, the Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond which is the largest blue diamonds in the world. It was quite impressive to see up close although I found the synthetic gemstone exhibit much more enthralling, especially the chemically flawless white diamond they had.

It was at this point that we decided to grab some lunch and see how we were doing for time. It was already 3pm and we hadn’t gotten through half of the rest of the exhibits we wanted to see. For those of you considering going there it’s really a whole day experience if you take your time with everything. You could probably run around everything in under 2 hours, but that wouldn’t be doing the museum justice. Still we managed to knock over quite a few of the sections including the human evolution, sea creatures and dinosaur section before we got the announcement to get out. Before you all ask yes I did get to see my favourite dinosaur:

When we exited the museum it was already getting dark so we headed back to the hotel to figure out our next move. I ended up zoning out for a good 30 minutes on the couch before deciding that we should hit up the gym for the second time we’ve been here in NYC. Once that was out of the way I found us a nice out of the way italian restaurant that managed a decent meal. Nothing spectacular but it was differently different from everything else we had had so it was at least a refreshing chance. We then hit up a local ice cream place for a little bit of desert on the way back to the hotel, slogging our way through the late night crowds in Times Square.

Tomorrow we’re hoping that the next few attractions on our hit list aren’t quite as massive as the Natural History Museum was. Sure we could do our part by not getting up late in the day but when you’re on holiday it just seems wrong to force yourself out of bed. We’ve got another 2 full days here in the big city before we head for a warmer climate and we’re definitely looking forward to making the most of them. Maybe I should set an alarm for 8am, just to be sure 😉