View Summer ’09 Part IIe in a larger map
Previously: Exploring SeaWorld
After our full day at SeaWorld, we went out to meet Prairie’s cousin Dayna for dinner. She’d given us directions to a nice little Japanese restaurant not too far away from SeaWorld, so we all met there. After dinner we wanted to find a good place to get a picture of the three of us, since Dayna wouldn’t be making it to the planned family gathering later in the week, so we drove up to Balboa Park. As it turns out, since we weren’t exactly sure where we were going, and as Balboa Park is huge, we didn’t find the entrance that got us to where Prairie was aiming, but we still found a nice section of the park to take the picture. By this point, as the sun was down and Prairie and I were exhausted after our day at SeaWorld, Dayna headed home and we went back to Prairie’s grandpa’s to crash out for the night.
The next day had been left slightly up in the air as to our final plan. We only had this last full day for exploration, and had been debating between exploring Balboa Park and going out to continue our zoo explorations at the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park. As tempting as the Wild Animal Park was, though, after spending all day out in the sun the day before, we ended up deciding that a day of poking around shady, air-conditioned museums at Balboa Park sounded much more bearable. We drove down to Balboa Park nice and early in the morning, got there right as the offices opened, and picked up Stay-for-the-day passes, which gave us admission to four museums for one discounted price.
Our choices for museums were…
- The Museum of Man, a museum of anthropology, which had some neat exhibits of Aztec/Mayan (and related) artifacts and imagery and of Egyptian mummies.
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The Museum of Photographic Arts. Small, only three exhibits, but this one ended up being our favorite. One exhibit was a retrospective of photographic portraiture; one was of insects in intricately staged scenes that ended up looking almost painterly, and the major exhibit was a retrospective of Ansel Adams‘ work. Though I knew of Adams, I’d never really explored his work before, and having my first real exposure be the actual prints in a museum setting was incredible. Beautiful stuff.
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The Museum of Art. Nice, with some neat exhibitions (including a bit of Picasso and related artists). The two neatest sections were one of jewelry by sculptor Alexander Calder (whom I’d only previously known of by his big public sculptures), and one of photographic portraits by Richard Avedon covering his entire career.
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The Museum of Natural History, with some neat dinosaur and other prehistoric animal exhibits. Once again, photography ended up being the star attraction, with the top levels of the museum hosting a showing of arial photos of geographical features and the top entrants from a juried competition of nature photos. The only downside to this museum was how many of the exhibits wanted to eat me.
Between museums, we wandered around and explored some of the park’s gardens, a pretty botanical garden building, and cooled our feet in a big fountain. When we decided we’d done all that we could do for the day, we headed back to Prairie’s grandpa’s, stopping off at one of the many local Mexican chains for some good southern California grub.
Here’s the slideshow of photos from the day, or you can see the day’s photos on Flickr.