Wandering Aidan: New York Extravaganza

We're still working to catch up here at Wandering Aidan blog, so today's episode will feature two days of pure New York goodness.

Our second day of New Yorking was mainly dominated by an excursion to the famous Natural History museum. Continuing our theme of going to movie shoot locations, we tracked down a few of the parts of the museum featured in "Night at the Museum." We learned that, sadly, some of the exhibits from the movie don't actually exist in the museum, such as the displays of miniature cowboys and Roman soldiers. Even the entrance hall looks quite different, featuring two dinosaurs instead of one.

However, the museum still held some interesting surprises- for instance, a life-size model of a blue whale. As it turns out, whales are big!

Though it's not clear in this picture, the tail extends to the other end of the room.

Our personal favorite part of the museum, though, was the new dinosaur skeleton. The new find belongs to the group Titanosaur- meaning it is really, really, ridiculously big- but its species is currently unknown, and thought to be new.

That was all interesting, but the real reason we loved it was that it was too big to fit in the room, so its neck simply continued into the hallway.

The titanosaur welcomes visitors to the dinosaur section.

After we were done at the museum, we explored around Central Park a bit. The park is huge, boasting a perimeter of around 6 miles, so we only explored a small part of it- but we loved that small part. The part in question is Belvedere Castle, a small castle located towards the center of the park, and yet another out-of-place building in a modern city. As up-to-date as New York is, it still has its fair share of old buildings, and we found all of them.

Interestingly, the upper part of the tower has vines growing across it like a net.

On our third and final day in New York, we took a ferry past the Statue of Liberty. An interesting fact about this monument is that the waters surrounding the island are all part of New Jersey (the line between the states goes across water, and the Statue is on the New Jersey side). However, that small island still counts as part of New York.