Yesterday, for something completely different, we took our portable GPS and set off for the Cincinnati Museum Center, a huge former train terminal from the 1900's when trains were the preferred intercity method of travel.
On arrival at the parking lot, we were told that all the handicapped spaces opposite the building appeared taken, so we parked in the main lot and tugged out the wheelchair. The wind chill was pretty palpable, but we survived the push up the sloping drive to the main building. After a few attempts and some compression, we were able to get the 24-inch chair through the 24-inch doors, and proceeded to buy tickets to the Natural History Museum section.
We navigated several areas of the NH, mainly by trying to brake the chair from rolling down the interior ramps. Many exhibits display the natural history of Ohio. It gives one pause to contemplate the lower jaw of a mammoth, compare it with that of a mastodon, and realize that both stomped the Ohio landscape from the Ice Age until about 10,000 years ago.
As a learning center, this museum is not burdened by today's computerized electronics. Rather than clicking mice or breaking lightbeams, these exhibits tend to offer specimens mounted on the walls, with a bit of natural history narrative below, terminating in a question which can be answered by lifting up a cover, below which is printed the correct response. Most of these are multiple-choice. This simplistic, non-mechanical approach means, essentially, that the only thing that can go wrong is that a lightbulb may burn out inside a display case. In fact, the few displays that actually used computers didn't seem to be working.
Have you ever seen the underside of a blue jay? Perhaps. But all of the birds in the collection are mounted on their backs, so the undersides are pretty much all you see. This is interesting because it's not the usual way you see birds, except in flight, and they are too fast to study in that mode.
It took about two hours to move through to the end of the museum, which terminates in a display of the contents of a number of 19th century outdoor privies, excavated in the back yards of older houses in the earliest parts of the city. What is left of a 38-caliber revolver tossed down the hole is perhaps the most interesting of the many household articles and vast quantities of hand-blown bottles. This exhibit is artfully located just down the hall from the restrooms on the lowest level.
At 3:00 pm it would be time to watch the Omnimax film "Grand Canyon Adventure". We were led to the elevator, where we ascended to the globe-shaped theatre. While waiting for the current showing to release its audience, we bantered with a couple of older couples, who "always wanted to see the Grand Canyon/always wanted to go whitewater rafting".
The movie itself is an experience that can be, at times, disorienting. It's a bit like watching the news crawl at the bottom of a weather channel: when you look up at the main screen after watching the marquee scroll for a while, you could swear the screen was moving. But because the Omnimax is like having your head inside a globe, some scenes, such as lifting off over the edge of a mile-deep gorge, can make you feel as though you were actually on board the helicopter. It's not 3D, unless you mean disorienting, dizzying and death-defying.
So, yeah. We got our money's worth, and more. And we left promptly at 4:00 pm. Within 20 minutes, we were in a traffic snarl that came close to being a parking lot, on I75. There had been "an accident". All it takes in the big cities is one car to depart from the norm, and we're all in trouble. I truly believe that an evacuation order from Cincinnati would be impossible to fulfil.
Some time later, after successive arguments with Jill, our GPS unit who seems always to want to bring you back to the route that you were taking when the trouble occurred, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to fill the stomach and pass the time. On the wall were three old tools that evoked some reminiscences of my days in the cottage country of Central Ontario.
The first was a two-man crosscut saw. My Dad and my Uncle Sid (who is now about 98) are preserved on DVD cooperatively trimming the logs that underpinned our lakeside dock with one of these.
The second was a drawknife, used to rip the bark off branches when making wooden rustic furniture.
The third was a nipper, that I had seen a couple of times used by a blacksmith to pull the old nails from horses' hoofs.
Was that a day!
