Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Dead Sea Sledding

Yesterday evening, we went to the Pacific Science Center to see the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit with our out of town guests.

We are members of the Pacific Science Center, so admission is free, but the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit was an additional fee and with scheduled admission times. We got there at 5pm, but were able to get tickets for the 8:15 admission. No big deal, we went to Center House, ate dinner, came back and spent some time in the museum and then went to the exhibit.

The kids had fun and a butterfly landed on my face in the Tropical Butterfly exhibit.

We went into the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit and in the first exhibit our youngest kid unscrewed one of the nuts holding the plexiglass displays on the wall. I guess we are breeding art thieves and heck, if they are going to start with religious relics - Indiana Jones anyone?

There were lots of exhibits about the settlement/ruins around the caves where the scrolls were found and we went through them slowly. The exhibit closes at 10 and after about 1:30, we hadn't made it to the scrolls yet. Parker got into the audio tour part of it and spent a bunch of time just punching the code into his player. At times, I swear he was talking back to the voices on the player.

We hustled into the scroll area and it was a little disappointing. All the scrolls are obviously in pieces, but they only had small chunks on display. All in all, it was a little of a let down. They are of great historical significance, so it was neat to see it from that standpoint. I think I was more interested in the exhibits about the nearby settlement.

Heather just shared with me the full price, had we not been members, and I don't think the exhibit would have been worth it...

As we returned home, it was starting to snow. Which bode well for our sledding plans.

So we got up early this morning and headed out to Snoqualamie Summit's tubing area. We arrived a little bit later than we anticipated, so we waited until the second session of the day. It was our first time there and tubing was fun - not quite as fun as sledding and Chase and Alec really got into it. Parker and I crashed (yes, on inner tubes) on our first run and he didn't want to do it much longer. Heather and I ended up taking turns for a while.

With the tow rope, it was definitely easier, but waiting in line for the tow rope made walking up the hill much faster. It lightly snowed all while we were up there.


The tubing area was fun, but I don't know if it was worth the admission price, especially when we had one kid that really didn't want to do it. Maybe next year...

No comments: