A Night at the Museum

A beautiful day to go to the museum!

This is just the lobby of the museum,
there is a whole floor of dinosaurs! Mike
is clearly acting like one here....

One of the best things to do when it's cold and yucky out is enjoy some of New York's great "indoor activities".  It's the best time of year to go to a museum, catch up on all the Oscar nominations at the movies, or maybe even go see a show.  I've visited New York several times before we moved here.  And upon those visits I explored various museums and various exhibits.

Butterfly exhibit.  There were thousands
of them all over the place!

But since moving here, the only museum outing I've had was a girls day that was admittedly prompted by Lady Gaga (it was the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met).  As one of Mike's New Years resolutions, we vowed to be more "New York-y" in 2012, and that means we took our first trip to the museum of the year.

Super pissed off T-Rex

It has been a crazy month for both of us with Mike traveling every week.  But on Saturday we woke up to sunny skies and "fall-like" weather on this last weekend of January.  So we were eager to get out and enjoy the day.  I'd been hesitant to battle the weekend crowds/children, and attempt the long trek to the upper west side (i.e. the hardest place to get to from where we live!), but yesterday Mike and I took an adventure to the Natural History Museum.  Of all the museums in New York, this is one of the ones I thought would be a fun excursion.  There are animals and dinosaurs all over the place...plus it was the setting for that awesome Ben Stiller movie.  So rather than figuring out multiple subways & public transit....we took cabs...both ways....not so "New York-y".  

This was a prehistoric bear skeleton...any
opportunity for me to support the Bears I'll take.
BEAR DOWN!

As expected, the museum was hustling and bustling, and there was a live butterfly exhibit that was special just for the next few months.  We took a few hours and explored every floor of the Natural History Museum, including a 15 minute stint in an 85 degree room swarming with beautiful butterflies.  It felt like a little tropical retreat...with a lot more people and kids.  I've never in my life seen that many butterflies.

So tropical!

 I'm not a museum connoisseur, but the NHM HAS to have one of the best collections of dinosaur bones of any museum ever.  They literally had  full skeletons of every dinosaur imaginable.  It was absolutely my favorite part of the trip.  And who would have known that they had a collection of Pacific People artifacts that included a floor to ceiling tiki man.  The exact one that Mike has tattooed on his arm!  I'd say that was one of his highlights!

That is a giant, life sized blue wale in the
marine life exhibit

Notice the proximity to the stage

Just a little bit of Steve shredding

I also have to make a call out about the spontaneously awesome way we ended the night.  After our trip to the museum, Mike heard about a small little show at a jazz club with Steve Stevens & Sebastian Bach.  I think it goes without saying that I am one of the biggest Skid Row fans ever.  Mike even tried to figure out if there was a way to get them to play at our wedding.  Yes, it would have been a little crazy, but awesome nonetheless. We saw them in LA a few years ago on St. Patrick's day, but sadly without Baz...and Baz is awesome.  So we called up our favorite concert buddies, the Novos, and braved the theater district on a Saturday Night...that's freakin gutsy.

 We may or may not have bribed the hostess a little bit to get the front table, but it was absolutely worth it.  The show was in at an old venue called the Iridium, a historic venue where Les Paul used to play weekly shows.  Our seats were right on the stage!  I could have helped Steve Stevens play his guitar if I he'd let me.  And Matty got to sing "Youth Gone Wild" with Sebastian Bach.   It felt like the guys were just jammin' and having a good time.  They sang a little Billy Idol, AC/DC, Van Halen, and of course Skid Row.  The venue was so intimate, and the crowd was so "authentic".  It made for such an amazing experience that will be hard to match ever.  These are the types of things that you can only experience in a great city like New York and I'm thankful that we get to take advantage of these little gems as much as we can!

Yikes, someone needs a tan!