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Date: June 14, 2003 Place: Museum of Natural History Cleveland, Ohio Cost: We paid the $2.00 special Parade the Circle rate. Ovearll Rating: 4.0 Pictures: View the Photo Album

Most Fun for Adults The Wildlife Center and Woods Garden is a newly redone outside exhibit that features live animals native to Ohio. You can see owls, deer, turkeys, a bald eagle, river otters, bobcats, foxes and more. The exhibits for each animal are spacious and seem very true to their natural habitat. Most Fun for Kids In addition to the Wildlife Center, the kids really like the Global Shoes exhibit. This is a temporary exhibit at the museum from April 12-July 27, 2003. Kids get to see 187 different pairs of shoes which are to introduce the children to shoes worn in different cultures around the world. They got to try on clown shoes, cowboy Best ages for this attraction Our kids were 8 and 10 and they both had a lot of fun. I think anyone between 4 and 12 would be interested. Even the mom's were putting on the tap shoes. What it's like The basic museum offers exhibits exploring the natural world. The first exhibit we walked into was the Hall of Human Ecology which had several stuffed animals. The kids loved taking pictures of the animals since they could get close and take a good shot. We also saw the oldest watercraft ever found in North America which is a 3,600 year-old Ringler dugout boat. It was a hollowed large trunk of an oak tree which held three or four people. You could see the worn spots where the men sat in the boat. The Wildlife Center & Woods Garden is like a mini-zoo attached to the museum. All the animals looked very healthy and comfortable in their spacious environments. It was a wonderful exhibit to walk through. You get to see the animals in their native environment and the exhibit is shaded by trees. My favorite was the two otters who swam around playing together. There was also a pair of foxes that seemed to be having some fun running around inspecting the gal who was in their area raking the ground. There are several benches where you can rest and sit back and watch the animals if you need a break. The bald eagle is very impressive and he has a huge nest built for him up in the tree. We found the dinosaur exhibit, standard to almost all natural history museums, in the Kirtland Hall of Prehistoric Life. There were a few dinosaur skeletons we had not see before such as the Allosaurus which seemed like smaller version of a T-Rex. The Wade Gallery of Gems and Jewelry has a unique collection of gemstones. One of the people we met told us that the man who donated the diamond collection used to carry around colored diamonds in his pockets at all times and then when he died he donated them to the museum. That had me curious to see the exhibit and indeed there were a variety of colored diamonds which I did not even know existed. There is also a sparkling exhibit of opals in all their various colors. Outside the main entrance of the museum they have "Steggie" which is a life-sized Stegosaurus sculpture that all the kids like to climb on as if she were a jungle gym. We only spent an hour and a half at the museum so we did not get to see it in its entirety. Also available is the Shafran Planetarium where you can watch a sky show of the night sky at this time of year. Tickets for the planetarium show were $3.00 additional to the cost of admission. See the Slideshow!

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