With another beautiful day on the way we decided to go back to Balboa Park so we could check out a couple of museums and some more of the gardens. Since we didn't plan on leaving until eleven or so, I gathered up the bed sheets and our current load of dirty clothes and went off to the laundry. Two hours and half a book later Tina helped me fold the clean clothes and return to the coach. As soon as we finished making the bed and putting everything away we turned on the A/C, said good-bye to the kids and headed north. Exiting the freeway at 6th Avenue we drove up 6th, turned right onto El Prado and straight into Balboa Park. We found a parking area behind the Mengei International Museum and pulled into a parking spot right around 11:30 AM.
From the parking lot we walked through the Alcazar Garden which is patterned after the famous Alcazar Castle in Seville Spain. This is a formal garden bordered with boxwood hedges and planted every year with over 7,000 plants for vibrant color throughout the year. Passing through the gardens we walked across El Prado and over to the California Building with its 200 foot spire. This is the home of the Museum of Man, devoted to anthropology with a focus on mesoamerican culture, the Mayans, Aztex, Toltecs and Olmecs. The museum is home to an incredible array of stellas and zoomorphs, copies made in the field in 1914 and placed here for the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition. The displays trace the history of the native peoples with interpretations of the hieroglyphs describing the events leading to specific points in time.
From the Museum of Man we went to the Building housing the Photographic Arts Museum where we had a really nice lunch at the Cafe in the Park. From here we went downstairs to the San Diego Model Railroad Museum, which has 28,000 square feet of displays with four huge operating models going plus a look at a new display under construction. It's a pretty amazing place. Much of the geography of the models is based on real places and there are photos showing reality vs the copy scaled down to 1/8 or 1/20 actual size. Really incredible!!
Leaving the trains we crossed the street to the Natural history Museum. The museum is dedicated to Paleontology with a permanent exhibit called Fossil Mysteries, covering 75 million years of the rich fossil history of Southern and Baja California.
Their current exhibit, Dinosaurs; Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries has life size models of more than 35 different dinosaur species. With displays covering how scientific thinking has evolved over the past 50 years and how scientists are reinterpreting many of the most persistent and puzzling mysteries of the dinosaurs—how they looked, how they behaved, how they moved—and ultimately, the complex and hotly debated theories of why they became extinct. We really enjoyed the museum.Finally we were able to enjoy a twenty minute IMAX 3-D movie, a global adventure of science and discovery featuring the entire age of dinosaurs—from the earliest creatures of the Triassic period to the monsters of the Jurassic and Cretaceous, the film takes you on a journey with the world’s preeminent dinosaur hunters. It was very well done but too short.
Leaving the Natural History Museum we wound our way through the park hoping to walk through the Japanese Friendship Garden. Unfortunately we arrived after it closed so we headed for the car and drove home. Arriving back at the coach we took the kids on a really long walk. By the time we got back it was almost 5:30 PM and Tina was not ready to cook dinner. So we decided to take it easy and drove over to El Torito for a quick Mexican meal. Turned out to be pretty good!
The rest of the evening we watched the next installment of "Life" on the Discovery channel.
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