Tuesday morning, not as early as I would have liked, we hit the road for Boston, to visit The Museum of Science. It originally opened in 1972, and my Mom joined as soon as possible -- maybe even before it opened. We met my sister and her grandson there, and four hours flew by. We saw the show in the Theater of Electricity, with the largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generators ever:
My (grand? great?)nephew was thrilled to be picked as a volunteer in the show and did a fine job at demonstrating how strong magnetic force can be. We also saw a live animal talk about scorpions (which are both arthropods and arachnids), and wandered through several of the exhibit halls. The Collections room held an abundance of beautiful objects.
We ended our day at the museum with the IMAX movie, Mystic India, which was both interesting and beautiful in subject matter and presentation.
After the museum, we headed north in horrific rush-hour traffic to our hotel with its indoor waterpark. The kids enjoyed it, although they may have enjoyed their room service supper and breakfast more. Overall impression of the waterpark: fun, but also very noisy, humid, and a bit stuffy. We escaped to the outdoor jacuzzi where it was considerably quieter and the air, though cold, was much fresher. It was odd being at a water park with no sun shining down! The park itself is well-laid out with four huge water slides (the stairs up, and pool where you land, are both inside, the slides themselves are outside), plus two smaller slides and many tiny ones, plus various water jets, play pools, and a tubing river surrounding the central area. It wasn't too crowded and the kids enjoyed finally being able to play in some water.
Our wristbands were good until 3PM but we cleared out about 2-ish, and headed back to the Museum. It was my idea; we spent so much time at the shows on Tuesday that there were huge chunks of the museum we didn't get to see. We spent another two hours there today, and got to see a lot more, although ideally you would visit often for an hour or two, and only visit one or two galleries during that time to really see everything. There is just so much there to see and do, it's a bit overwhelming.
Of course we stayed too late, and got stuck in traffic, again.
I was so bored in the stop-and-go traffic I started taking pictures in the tunnel. Beauty can be found where we least expect it. We stopped for dinner and a new tank of gas on the way back to Mom's, and finally got here about 9:30PM. Next time, I'll know better: hang out and have dinner in Boston and wait for the traffic to dissipate (about 7PM, I'd say), and end up getting back earlier.
The kids amazed me today by reading nearly non-stop all the time we were in the car. It made for a very quiet, pleasant ride, even with the horrible traffic and gloomy weather. Tomorrow's forecast contains the word "sun", so here's hoping.
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