Guess Where I Was Today?

The Wife and I took the Granddaughter over to the Cincinnati Museum Center today. I figured it would be a good time. It was a weekday and I was on vacation, so it should have been fun.

After all, it was just us. And what felt like a half million of our closest friends.

Seriously, the place was so crowded you could not walk anywhere in the Children's Museum. The Ball Room was 3 deep at every device, the Play City was overrun completely and the Building Zone was full as well. There is a place where you stack some foam blocks to build an arch. Two kids were playing with half the blocks, so we couldn't build it; a fact we didn't discover until half of the arch was up. And the punk kids' parents didn't say a word about it.

Over at the building panels area the Young'un searched for 5 minutes for a hammer so she could play with the nails and panels. She finally found one and was just ready to start banging away when a little boy came over to where she had picked up the hammer with a hand full of parts. He started looking around and asked his brother- Where's my Hammer?. Without prompting the Young'un promptly handed it back to him. She knew who's hammer it was.

It was like that everywhere in that place. We finally left and went to the other Museums, which were almost as bad.

The picture is from the main rotunda showing one half of the mural that spans the half dome, showing the progress from early settlers to the modern (1933) day. Done as a fresco with tile as accents these were only the largest of the murals done by Reinhold Weiss. Back in the concourse- where the train gates were- there were a series of murals depicting various 1933 Cincinnati manufacturing processes. When the concourse was torn down in the 1970's all of the murals were moved to the Greater Cincinnati airport. Unfortunately modern travel restrictions mean they are almost as viewable as if they had disappeared with the concourse.

One interesting display that is new since the last time I was there was down in the Museum of Natural History. There was a Dinosaur skeleton- an Allosauraus, if I remember correctly- that was compared to a modern Chicken.

Yep, a chicken. Apparently modern science now believes that dinosaurs aren't extinct; they survive as modern birds. Which is something I have been saying for years. Anybody has ever seen the claw of a rooster will have no trouble believing chickens are actually dinosaurs.

But just imagine a T-Rex with feathers.