Windy Day in Balboa Park! ~ December 27, 2006

Believe it or not, there is a car hidden underneath that tree!

After the rain, it stayed windy all day. It was REALLY windy! As we were walking through Balboa Park, palm fronds were blowing off the trees. One big branch fell down onto the sidewalk with a loud CRASH. Luckily no one was standing underneath it at the time. Later, we saw that one area of the park by the International House had been roped off because of all the branches falling off an adjacent row of trees. The water from the big fountain at the end of El Prado was blowing sideways! We were standing near the fountain when all of a sudden we heard a squeal and a crash on nearby Park Blvd. We ran over there to see what was going on. First we saw a taxi that had spun around and was facing the opposite direction up on the sidewalk. We stood there for the longest time trying to figure out how that had happened. It wasn’t until we walked across the bridge and looked on the other side that we got the whole story. A big tree had fallen down across the road, landing on a parked car and hitting another car. Too bad we weren’t standing on the bridge at the time – it would have been an amazing sight to see that tree tipping over, although it must have happened pretty fast. The emergency vehicles came and the lady in the car was okay. I wonder where the person in the parked car was. They were in for quite a shock when they returned to their vehicle! A bunch of people were standing up on the grassy hill watching and we walked over there, too. For such a large tree, it didn’t have a very big root ball where it had pulled out of the ground, so no wonder it was easy for the wind to blow it over. Maybe they watered it with shallow drip irrigation and that’s why it didn’t develop a strong root system. Anyway, the park crew came right away with their axes and chain saws to cut up the tree and remove it. There was a big traffic jam, of course. A couple of cameramen showed up, and later on when we got back to the hotel we saw it on the local news!

San Diego Model Railroad Museum ~ December 27, 2006

The San Diego Model Railroad Museum is the largest indoor model railroad display in the world! The individual HO and N scale layouts are also among largest of their type. The San Diego Model Railroad Museum is located on the lower level of the Casa De Balboa on El Prado in Balboa Park.

The mission of the San Diego Model Railroad Museum is to preserve the heritage of railroading through a series of miniature representations of California railroads. The model railroads are constructed by volunteer club members.

Train Layouts

Cabrillo Southwestern – This O-Scale exhibit is a freelance model of an imaginary prototype and features an electric trolley line. The layout is being built in place to give visitors a first-hand view of model railroad construction.

Pacific Desert Lines – An N-Scale Exhibit for which club members have won awards for their meticulous craftsmanship and painstakingly realistic details. For example, the model of San Diego's Santa Fe depot was constructed using actual blueprints of the building. The Carlsbad power plant has fiber optic strobe lights on top of its chimney.

San Diego & Arizona Eastern – This HO-Scale exhibit features an impressive 10- foot high model of the Carriso Gorge in eastern San Diego County and the Goat Canyon trestle, which was the largest timber railroad trestle in the world at the time of its construction in 1932.

Tehachapi Pass – An HO-Scale exhibit of Tehachapi Pass, which is still considered the busiest single-track freight railroad in the U.S.

Toy Train Gallery – This interactive exhibit features 3-Rail, Lionel and Brio layouts. The trains have realistic horns, whistles, engine sounds, and even smoke. A camera car broadcasts a real-time video onto a color television screen so that you can see the scene from an engineer’s point of view. There is also an underground coal mine section where kids can push buttons to operate the coal cars.

Lego City Visiting Exhibit – They really should have a permanent display of Lego trains, but luckily we just happened to go there at the time of a Lego City Visiting Exhibit which began on November 21st and ends on January 26th. This was pretty neat since we weren’t going to Legoland this year so the kids got to see a Lego exhibit anyway! This display included the usual cute details for observant viewers such as R2D2, Spiderman, etc.

TIPS: Be prepared to pick up your little one often or carry him or her on your shoulders throughout the museum. While there are steps and platforms at strategic locations, and the Toy Train Gallery is built at a child’s eye level, they will also want to see portions of the displays that are located at an adult’s eye level. Speaking of kids, we learned from experience that if you don’t like crowds it’s best to visit the museum on a school day, not on a weekend or during a school holiday. There is a snack bar conveniently located just upstairs from the museum. You can schedule School and Community Group Tour admissions, birthday parties, and they also offer summer camps.

WEBSITE: The San Diego Model Railroad Museum’s website at www.sdmodelrailroadm.com has an extensive online model railroad library, exhibit information and photo gallery, and a kids corner with a Virtual Railway. Guide your train, switch the track up, and control its route. How many different ways can you send the train around the track?

San Diego Natural History Museum ~ December 27, 2006

The last time we were at the San Diego Natural History Museum was probably about ten years ago, and boy was I shocked when I visited it this time. It sure wasn’t the same old natural history museum that I remembered! I didn’t realize that it had been renovated in 2001, with a new wing added on. I guess I’m just old-fashioned, because I liked it better the way it was. They call it the Natural History Museum of the 21st Century, but now its style is more like a hands-on science center.

The Natural History Museum building on Balboa Park’s Prado is a registered historic site, having been dedicated on January 14, 1933. I’m thankful that at least the familiar entrance on El Prado was left intact. Nevertheless, once you step inside it looks like the building was gutted out and opened up. Originally, the north and east exterior facades were meant to be temporary walls slated for future expansion. The new wing extends from those temporary walls of 1933.

The museum now has two major entrances – the ornate historic south entrance adjacent to the main fountain in Balboa Park, and the new north-facing entrance across from a giant fig tree. The new wing is mostly a big open atrium as far as I can see, along with a snack bar, gift shop, exhibit hall, big screen theater, and large lobby. That long bronze “crack” in the floor is actually a reproduction of the San Andreas Fault, and there is a large relief map on the back wall depicting the Southern California-Baja California region.

At the time we were there, they were showing Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth. So far I wasn’t impressed. They should just stick with their “Ocean Oasis” movie. Downstairs, the traveling exhibit on “Dinosaurs: Reel & Robotic” was pretty interesting since our family likes movies and animation, and it was neat to learn about the history of our favorite monster films like “King Kong” and “Godzilla.” However, it still wasn’t what I would consider to be natural history.

Where were the rooms full of dinosaur bones and dioramas? The new construction more than doubles the size of the old building, and yet it seems like there aren’t that many exhibits. There is a comprehensive Wildfire section focusing on the San Diego fire of 2003. They also have an interactive walk-through prehistoric environment, but it’s all about evolution and extinction. I’m so sick of having evolution force-fed to us wherever we go. Now they’re spoon-feeding it to the kids with clever hands-on exhibits in attempt to show how evolution relates to us. I just want to have an opportunity to see the actual fossils and come to my own conclusions, thank you. And what about the flora, fauna, and habitats of today? I saw better displays of those at Cabela’s, and that was free!

One thing that I did like was the giant computerized globe showing the tectonic plate movement and shifting continents. That was pretty cool. And the Foucault Pendulum is still there, fascinating onlookers as they watch it swing back and forth and wait for it to knock down a small wooden tree on the floor. My 16-year-old son is studying Physics right now, and when he started telling me about the oscillation rate of the pendulum, a guy turned and looked over at him as if wondering what he was talking about.

I finally did find one room downstairs that still had the feeling of the old museum! Natural Treasures Past & Present has lots of fossils and rocks, insects and stuffed animals, in glass display cases as well as live critters including a rattlesnake, scorpion, and black widow spider.

I guess we picked a bad time to go, because I found out later that a lot more exhibits are in the planning stages but haven’t been installed yet. In the future, there will be a state-of-the-art interactive walk across Southern California – from the ocean to the mountains to the desert – with state-of-the-art dioramas, interactive exhibits, multimedia presentations, etc. Now that sounds more like it! To learn more about the exhibits, see:
http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/index.html
http://www.sdnhm.org/exhibits/future/index.html

By the way, tickets already went on sale a year in advance for the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition which will be coming to the museum from June 29–December 31, 2007. The Israel Antiquities Authority will be bringing one of the world's greatest archaeological discoveries to the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Did You Know…? In 1943, the U.S. Navy took over the Natural History Museum for hospital use. They added a nurse’s station and an elevator designed to handle gurneys, and turned the museum into an infectious disease ward!

Balboa Park Nativity Display ~ December 27, 2006

We parked near the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. The organ was closed at the time, but we got to see the Community Christmas Center Nativity display across from the Organ Pavilion. There were disclaimers all over it stating that the City of San Diego in no way endorses the display, but I was pleased to see that they allow it anyway. Since 1989 the Community Christmas Center Committee has set up this series of life-size dioramas, each depicting a different scene from the Nativity story: the Angel Gabriel appearing before Mary, Mary and Joseph’s trek to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, the Shepherds, the arrival of the Three Wise Men, etc. It was a really neat exhibit and I’m glad we had a chance to see it before they took it down at the end of the season.