Each year, before my parents head south in January like migratory birds escaping the bitter cold of the Northeast, my mom scrambles to pack in as much QT (quality time) with my niece and nephew, brother and sister-in-law and me.
The first stop on this year’s QT Adventure Train was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We took my nephew, Michael, to the Museum of Natural History, where we saw exhibits featuring frogs and butterflies and dinosaurs (oh my!), an IMAX movie called “Tornado Alley,” and took a journey into space at the Hayden Planetarium. Over lunch we debated career options for Michael: maybe a meteorologist or storm chaser like the ones in the movie; an astronaut from “Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration;” or an archaeologist, after he and Grandma unearthed a fossil in an exhibit. We ended the afternoon with
our eyes on the heavens at the planetarium, where narrator Whoopi Goldberg took us on a “Journey to the Stars.”
While he loved the museum and all that we saw, Michael admitted during our debrief of the day that the ride on the C train to and from the Port Authority was his favorite activity, and hanging out with Grandma and Aunt Cindy was a close second. As for the museum, he informed us that next time we would need to bring our sleeping bags for a sleepover beneath the 94-foot-long giant blue whale. That’s going to have to wait until Spring, when the ground thaws, the days get longer, and the snowbirds make their return trip north. An adventure to look forward to!
Want to see more? The entire gallery can be found at: http://tiny.cc/poxxk
