New York Hall of Science and the Queens zoo

The New York Hall of Science

After our day at the Bronx zoo, we spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa's apartment in Queens. We filled their living room right up - 3 kids on the couches and the rest of us on air mattresses on the floor, that barely fit. Heh. The next day, we visited the New York Hall of Science and the Queens Zoo, both at Flushing Meadows Park. We paid for parking at the science center and walked to the zoo.

The Hall of Science is pretty large - we didn't make it through the entire thing before we had to quit for lunch. The area I thought was the best was the basement level - their Maker section. There are a number of small workshop areas for various projects that people can participate in. Sunny and Posy ended up in a costume-making workshop with paper and plastic-y vinyl-type stuff to make masks, capes, and other costume type accessories. (I don't even know what it was. Not fabric.) And in a side room, they had high school interns doing small demonstrations. Our girls made bracelets with beads that change colors in the sun.

The Queens Zoo is really small, but that was fine with us. We were slowing down by that point anyway. We went through a little "obstacle course" that talked about the balance of nature (with a balance beam to walk on - get it?!?) in ecosystems and the associated animals. There was also a little lesson about endangered animals with a "nest" of bald eagles to climb into.

We got to the children's zoo section just before it closed so there weren't many animals out. But we always like to put our faces in the photo cut-outs! And we caught up with a huge rabbit as he was being put into his cage for the night. I don't think I've ever seen a rabbit that big.

To conclude our weekend trip to New York, Sunday morning we went to church with my parents in a congregation that is primarily recent immigrants from the Carribean. My parents have been assigned there for 18 months to assist the local leadership in learning our church's administrative system. They were great people - can't wait to visit them again!