Hiking

Why haven't I written a blog post lately? Well, I've been busy. Zack and I have been taking advantage of the FINALLY warm-ish weather. We have driven many days to our favorite spot at Wahkeena Falls.

To get to Wahkeena Falls parking area takes a windy, slow drive. But if you take the freeway and park at Multnomah Falls with all those touristy suckers who don't know there are other spectacular waterfalls, you can take a trail and walk 1/2 mile to Wahkeena Falls. It's faster to park at Multnomah and walk to Wahkeena than to take the old Historic Highway directly there. Plus, you don't get carsick or have a headache when you get there.

Once at Wahkeena Falls, you can take a short .5 mile trail up to the bridge, and continue on for about 4 more miles if you want to hike up and across to the top of Multnomah Falls and back down to the car. Or you can skip the trail and just scramble up the rocks in the middle of the creek to get to the bridge. Zack and I did both this week. Only I fell pretty hard when we were climbing up the rocks, and my shin may never look the same. But it was worth it.

We pack a lunch and go sit on this bench to eat it.

I love Zachary. The days are ticking by too fast when he will start school this fall, so we have to enjoy every day until then.

More mummies

I have some more pictures of our NY adventure from the last day we spent in the city. We decided to go back to the Met one more time (yes this was 3 days in a row we went to the Met. It is that amazing).

But this day was very exciting because Stephen and Kit came from Connecticut to spend the day with us in NYC. They met us at the museum where we spent a bit of time going through the 19th and early 20th century paintings again, and the Ancient Egypt exhibit, which I believe you could spend a full week in.

Abram taught the cousins some cool things about the ancient Egyptians.

This granite sphynx was very cool to see and very well preserved.

Apparently we have no picture of the full temple they rebuilt inside of the museum, but let's just say you actually feel like you are in Egypt with the way they were able to recreate such a structure. It was really, really stunning.

After the museum we got on the subway and went down to Little Italy. Our intent was to have pizza at Lombardi's, which claims to be the first pizzaria in the US. Regardless of whether that is true or not, they truly had the best pizza I have ever eaten.

Right down the street from Lombardi's is a place called "Rice to Riches." All they have there is rice pudding. Yes, you read that right.

I am not a huge fan of rice pudding. Sure, it's OK. But there are about 30 other desserts I would choose before I would choose rice pudding. Mark, Stephen, Jacob, Ben and Casey decided to have rice pudding for dessert. I went in with an open mind and sampled about 5 flavors, which were all very tasty in a little spoon, but I just could not imagine eating an entire bowl of it, even if it did taste like chocolate or berries.

Kit, Abram, Alison and I all felt the same way and decided to go next door to Pink Berry to get frozen yogurt. But the boys were all happy with their rice pudding of various flavors.

After our trip to Little Italy, we rode the subway north again to the museum, where we said goodbye to our Connecticut family. Don't you think Mark's brother Stephen looks a lot like Mark?

We walked on down Central Park to FAO Schwartz, where the boys had been wanting to go play the Big Piano. We were there right at closing time, and nobody else was at the piano, so they got to play for a while. Turns out that Rachmaninoff's Prelude #3 in C# minor is a little trickier to play on that big piano.

Salvation

Sometimes Zachary says something that reminds me that he is a very smart kid who never misses a beat. He pays attention to everything, and remembers everything. Always. It is amazing.

Yesterday we got Coraline in the mail from Netflix. I had been hesitant to let the kids watch it, because it looked really creepy to me. I may be the only human who did not enjoy The Nighmare Before Christmas, but somehow that level of creepy just doesn't appeal to me. But they wanted to see it, so we finally put it in our queue. Zachary was OK for the first hour or so, but then it just got too dang spooky for him, and we turned it off.

Today as we were driving Noah and Savanna to school, Zachary was telling the kids about how Coraline was too scary for him. Noah said, "Zack, you can watch Lord of the Rings and Terminator Salvation and not be scared. Why would Coraline be scary to you?"

Zachary answered a question with a question. "Why do they call it 'Terminator SALVATION' anyway? Salvation is only in church movies."

Not that we watch a lot of church movies, but somehow he knew that salvation is a church word. He is paying attention.

Really, it is amazing what Zachary can sit through for movies without flinching, and then what minor thing will frighten him. For instance, about a month ago he watched The Little Mermaid for the first time. He loved it, but at the end when Ursula turns into the big monster, he buried his head in his blanket and said, "I just can't watch this!" And then he can sit and watch Aragorn and Legolas battle for middle earth and think nothing of it.

What a kid.

New York adventures, part 3: AKA Lady Liberty's guts

This was a great day. A very cold, very windy great day. I have not been so cold in a long time, but it was definitely worth the cold temperatures and wind to get to climb all 352 steps to the top of the State of Liberty.

Our tickets to Lady Liberty were for 2:00pm, so we decided to spend the morning at the Met again. We hadn't even seen the Ancient Egypt exhibit the day before, and we knew we had to get back to see at least that. We ended up spending another 3 hours at the museum, and then busting our butts to get all the way down Manhattan to catch the ferry to Liberty Island at 2:00.

We loved this giant sarcophagus of some guy (can't remember his name) who really thought he was important. He had the slaves build him a 50'x50'x50' limestone chamber, which was entirely then filled with sand, and his sarcophagus was placed exactly in the center of this sand. No wonder he was so well preserved and protected from the elements.

We loved seeing real-live canopic jars. We also got our favorite joke of the trip from this museum visit, "What's wrong with you? Did you leave your brain in a canopic jar?"

Did you know that the Book of the Dead is actually---a book? A real thing? The full thing is on display at the Met. It was interesting to read (no, I can't read ancient Egyptian--just trusting the translation) about the customs and religious rites of the Egyptians straight out of their book.

We ran out of the museum at 1:00pm knowing that we would be pushing it to get to South Ferry in time for our tickets. It's quite a brisk walk to get to the subway from the Met, and then a loooooong ride down to the tip of Manhattan.

If you ever want to go to Liberty's crown, you must get tickets months in advance. Months and months in advance. I bought ours last November as soon as I knew we were going to be in New York. The crown tickets are gone through the rest of the summer from what I hear. A big plus of Crown tickets is that when you get to the super long line to go through security and get onto the ferry boat, they totally let you cut in at the front of the line. Just like a movie star.

You see in this picture that Lady Liberty is off to the right in the background. Why wasn't I looking at her? Well, it's because there's a pretty dang good view of Manhattan from the boat. Every seat and standing place was taken on the lower decks of the boat, and it was freezing on the top. But we had the best view, even though we were frozen.Some people had trouble finding their land legs again.

I love the view of the statue and Manhattan in the background.

And now for an anatomy lesson. The statue itself is only about 3/8" thick. Made in the repussee technique from hammered copper sheets riveted together. This thin shell of copper has turned green on the outside, but the inside is still a beautiful golden/copper/brown color. The inside of the statue is supported by an Eiffel Tower-like structure (designed by none other than Monsieur Gustav Eiffel) along with hundreds and hundreds of stainless steel ribs that are riveted to the staute.

The original spiral staircase to the crown had been replaced by a new tiny spiral staircase, a double helix with separate up and down stairs twisting perfectly around each other. It was a long climb, and a miracle that Mark was able to climb stairs by this day, only 4 days after the marathon. He ended up coming down backward to save his quads, but he did it!

This is the back of her head, from the inside. Lots of cameras everywhere.I was so happy to be in the crown room, I couldn't stop smiling. The two park rangers up there that day were not so happy that we were happy to be there. We were the last ones up that day, and they wanted to go home. Boo on them. We had climbed 352 steps and we were going to relish the experience of being on top of the world.

Jacob in the crown.Looking out at NY Harbor.Abram the happy boy loved being in the crown.Just enough room for four of us up there.The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. That's the official title of the statue. Lady Liberty, The Copper Lady, the New Colossus, whatever you call her, she is magnificent. And yes, Nancy, I found the plaque this time--right at the end of the museum exhibit.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus"

New York adventures, part 2

How do you begin to describe the Metropolitan Museum of Art? We decided to go here and take our chances, even though the Museum of Natural History had been so crowded we could hardly see a thing the day before. We were pleasantly surprised with the lack of crowds at the Met, though. It was amazing that either many fewer people were there in the first place, or that the museum was so huge and open that it absorbed everyone much better. Whatever the reason, it was a heavenly place to spend the day. We were there for about 7 hours, and barely saw a fraction of what the museum had to offer. It was incredible. We also discovered the secret lower entrance to the right of the main steps--no lines for admission, plus a restroom right there as well.

I loved this picture of the buildings across from the Met. There were several spots in Manhattan where someone had held out and didn't sell their building out to high rise development on either side. This is one of many such holdouts we saw.

We were so delighted to find this Joseph-Siffrede Duplessis orignal painting of Benjamin Franklin, dated 1778.We were stunned to see Van Gogh's self portrait just sitting there in the middle of a gallery where anybody could walk up and touch it. Not that we did. It is just such a priceless work of art to be hanging out in the middle of the floor.
I love Monet. That Claude was a genius.

This is the Van Gogh we would buy if we could.

Jacob and Abram liked this "manly" painting.

We accidentally wandered into the "Modern Art" wing, because it was the closest way to get to a restroom. But we found some really, really cool stuff there.

The piece behind us on the wall is made up of several thousand hexagonal mirrors, all somehow attached to each other at just the right angle to give some very excellent reflections when you look into it from any angle.

Mark took this one of the four of us looking into the mirrors. Each tiny individual mirror has its own unique reflection, and if you zoom in on the picture, it is very cool. Looking into it made me sick, though. My brain couldn't figure out if it should focus on the whole reflection or the individual ones, and it sort of messed with my head. Well worth it, though.

We never quite figured out how somebody came up with this idea to paint rectangular pieces of canvas each a solid shade. Looks like a paint chip sample from Home Depot to me.

Not sure what this was, either.
Or this.

After so many hours at the Met, we decided to call it a day and go back the next morning. We headed down to the Plaza Hotel to meet up with my friend Emilee as she finished her gig. We walked through Central Park. Emilee and I had some honey roasted nuts as we talked about things old and new.

Jacob was just along for the ride.

Abram had wanted to eat a pretzel in Central Park while sitting on the grass the whole time we were there. This was finally the day that it was warm enough to do that.

Next up, Lady Liberty's guts.