For Pete’s birthday, we got a family membership in the American Museum of Natural History. It was kind of a lot of money for us, but we talked for years about how we’d like to go, but never did. Today, we went, just to scope out the building since neither of us had been there since the seventies and good thing! It is humongous.
DUCK! THE GIANT FAKE PLANETS MIGHT SEE YOU!
We discovered that if we take the train from New Brunswick to NY Penn Station, we can take the Subway directly to the museum. The museum has its own stop at 81st Street. The new membership allowed us to proceed directly to the lady searching bags. I don’t know what she was looking for, but she didn’t seem surprised when she found empanadas in my Angry Little Girl book bag. We sat down in the basement food court and studied the floor map, which didn’t help much. Neither of us ever got our bearings, which allowed us to stumble onto many delightful discoveries.
It must take almost superhuman restraint to make museum signs without punch lines.
The trip was very physically demanding. I nodded off on the train near Newark Airport. We cannot wait to go back.
Poor Impulse Control 
Best museum ever. The gem and mineral collection seems to have never changed. When I went back as an adult in my late twenties, I hadn’t been there in over ten years and I had to go to the gem room, which I loved as a child, and I remembered the Star of India and the other great stones, especially that really super big Beryl, and the big hunk of iron pyrite. I went back again when I was in my mid-thirties and damned if the room didn’t seem exactly the same to me. And all the rocks were in the same place. I love that room. The only thing that seemed really different to me as an adult was that there weren’t guys selling hot chestnuts from carts on the street. I loved the hit chestnuts. I remember my grandfather taking us kids to the museum when I was little and buying us all bags of hot chestnuts.
The chestnuts are a visceral reminder for me, too. Only my grandfather was dropping me off somewhere while he went to an audition. I love chestnuts.