So it has been awhile since we posted anything here, mainly because we have been too busy to go anywhere. Between school and soccer every weekend, we have not had a chance to travel much of anywhere recently.
Luckily, Columbus Day Weekend offered a welcome reprieve from that. I had a vacation day on Monday, but the kids still had school (haha! Suckers). But with some friends visiting some other friends, we decided to make a trip up to North Jersey
Initially, our plan was your typical fall weekend fare: apple / pumpkin picking at a nearby farm. Maybe a hayride if we had time. But the weather decided it wasn’t going to cooperate, and a fall farm trip with kids does not sound fun to me. Luckily, our friends have a membership to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. So we all hopped in the car so we could get the kids learned on a weekend.
Having the membership sure paid off for the guests! What normally would have been about $80 ended up being $17 for two kids and adults, plus another $7 for parking.
Considering the place is right across the river from Manhattan, I figured it would be packed. But the museum is pretty big, and it didn’t feel that crowded there. The most crowded part was in the Curious George exhibit. All the little kids were in there with their parents and it was nuts! All of the kids were standing around waiting to either take something out of another kid’s hand, or to push them out of the way to get there sooner. It was like one of those disaster movies when its every man for himself in the supermarket! Luckily, my kids are a little older so they got tired of that room real quick.
We didn’t see all the exhibits, but the rest of the museum was OK. The most popular thing with my kids was the Infinity Climber, a large play area hanging from the middle of the museum where the kids could climb around. They also enjoyed some of the other exhibits, but a lot of them were way over their heads. There was a large aquarium full of big fish that evidently live in the Hudson. There was also a subway car exhibit, which was pretty stupid. There were benches inside the car with video screens on the windows where British people were talking about getting colds from the Tube. How does the New York area screw up a subway exhibit? Couldn’t they follow the lead of the aquarium section and show alligators from the subway windows? Or at least Pizza Rat? Instead, its a bunch of Brits going “Crikey! I gots me the flu from the Tube, guvnah!”
The lunch offering there was pretty decent. They have a pretty good selection, and you can either grab something fast, or get something from the grill. And there are a bunch of rooms with seating, so getting a spot for a group of 12 was not a problem.
The most disappointing part of the trip was the realization that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, my son would be a goner. I know this because I got to do the zombie survival obstacle course with him. Yes, you read that right. A zombie survival course. In a SCIENCEmuseum. That is like having a werewolf petting zoo.
So my son was very excited to try this thing, mainly because one of the parts involved shooting a bow and arrow. So I waited in line with him for about 30 minutes. He went over a balance beam. Ran through zombie cut outs, and then I got to help him with the bow and arrow. After that, the teenage workers determined he was ready to face real zombies. So into the course we went.
I should have seen it coming. Despite assuring him for 30 minutes that zombies were pretend, despite hearing that a kid “freaked out” and stopped the course for 10 minutes, and despite watching him freak out on a boardwalk haunted house after he assured me he wasn’t going to be scared, I pushed my four year old onwards. I didn’t wait in line for 30 minutes for him to chicken out!
He froze up as soon as he had to cross the balance beam covered in fake blood. So when we saw the “zombies” I had to physically push him under the barbed wire fence to get away from them. Then in the next room, I helped him shoot another zombie with the bow and arrow. Luckily, they are highly susceptible to ankle shots, because that is all he managed to get off before he ran for the door.
Outside the obstacle course, the woman asked his name so he could get his official “I survived the zombies” card. I resisted the urge to tell her it was Chicken, or to rip it out of his hands. I did not leave that museum feeling that my son was ready for a world overrun with zombies. But if they try and catch him while the TV is on, he will probably fit right in!
