on our first visit to salt lake city a few month ago, derek was out of town for the week, and we were a good 50 minutes away from anything cool in the city. this time around, i had a long list of things i wanted to check out.
first on the list, was a return visit to ruth’s diner. i have been dreaming about the cinnamon roll french toast since june and i was finally ready to make this dream a reality.
anna informed me that she had also had similar feelings about the mile high biscuits.
hazel is also a fan of the massive teddy bear pancake.
from there, we planned to go to the children’s museum, but when i pulled up directions on my phone, i was politely informed that the museum might be closed. i checked. it was. so we changed plans and decided to go to the natural history museum of utah. it was a lot less hands on, but the kids still seemed to have fun.
some native american artifacts.
there was a deck, overlooking all of salt lake city. anna took the opportunity to get some sun.
in this shot, you can see downtown behind the kids to the right. and the capitol is even sticking up over there further to the right, if you can make it out.
back inside, we found the biology area. you know. dna and cells and stuff.
cell puzzle.
tarantula.
anna got all up close and personal (and separated by a wall of glass) with said tarantula.
ant colony.
wall of skulls.
then off to the terrain type area. we always love water tables, this one erosion themed.
earthquake simulator.
rocks and gems and minerals and such.
the special exhibit was all about pirates. it was pretty cool to me, but the kids were mostly interested in a computer display where you could dress the pirates in their traditional garb. this old pirate ship sail was pretty cool, but it was on our way out of the room and hazel was entirely over the whole thing at this point.
finally, dinosaurs.
we thought this part was really cool. you could walk over the (faux) bones, and see them through the floor, arranged how they were found at an archaeological dig. one of us had to be carried across.
dinosaur skull fragment puzzle master.
lastly, we happened upon the kiddie room. here we got to get a super close view of a black widow spider.
and a pink tarantula.
there was a water table. and some other animals. and a little fort area. and a dress up room. anna was the only kid i could talk into putting on a costume.
once we were done at the museum, we made our way to the capitol building for our obligatory state capital visit. i had high hopes of finding a cool spot where we could see the capitol set up on a hill, with a mountain backdrop, but as we drove closer, no such magical views emerged. we drove right up. parked across the street. and got busy photo shooting.
it’s still pretty awesome, i suppose.
we concluded our day of education with a random guy explaining to us why there were bison statues all over town. (when the olympics were in slc a few years back, local artists were commissioned to paint them for local businesses. now you know.)
and thus concludes our super educational day. 🙂
That looked both super educational, and ultra yummy!