Day 4 2001.11.29

Day 4 dawns rainy. No surprise there. Emails from home tell us that the pets are still alive and there's still no rain there. Again, no surprise. After our continental breakfast, we search out the Cincinatti Train Station which is full of everything but trains.

After a brief unscheduled tour of the downtown area we find the station. It's  the building about which I said "Cool! Look at that!" when we got off the expressway.
Art Deco.

Inside is 3 museums. The one we're interested in is the Natural History Museum. As you walk into the Station, the rotunda is pretty much as it was when it was built in 1931. Huge and about 6 stories high at the center. It's painted in primary colors and looks like nothing in 2 dimensions.

To the left is the Cincinatti Museum of Local History, below is the children's museum and to the right is the Cincinatti Museum of Natural History.  Just inside the door is a huge skeleton of a mastodon along with a mastodon jaw found locally around 1990.

<-------- Me, for scale


Some advice: always watch your back.

They must have gotten some serious grant money because it was just plain cool. The layout wound gently downward for about a 10 minute walk down 3 stories. There were large sections on caverns and the Ice Age. The mid-west is full of caves. Also ice ages.

They had a nature exchange center, where you brought in stuff and you could trade it for other stuff. Everything from chunks of obsidian to fossils to wasp nests (empty...).

What's a natural history museum without splashy rocks?

The obligatory local mammals (nearly all rodents, except the bats in the upper right.)

And the grossout case, with my daughter's hand for scale.

Next was the cavern exhibit. Wow. There was an easy path with no stairs and wide enough for a wheelchair, and there was a cool path that went up & down about 2 stories and in and out of huge chambers with falling water that you could only see through glass from the other path. There was also a section off the main path full of crawls to practice squeezing into.
Most of the stonework was quite believable.

The Ice Age section was also really amazing with a walk through glacier fissures and a hands on demonstration of the erosion caused by the melting glaciers. Alas much of this was ruined for us as hoards of nasty schoolkids tramped noisily (& uncontrolledly) through. After this School Age we found some killer fauna.
Modern beaver Megabeaver

Can you imagine that someone actually found this?

I think Wombat would be annoyed if we brought this one home.

Day 4
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