Before we left, I gave the kids a quick rundown of the Bible story. They might have heard it at daycare, but I was pretty sure they'd need a refresher course. So here I go, and I realize I have no idea how to tell the story. Do I tell it as if it really happened? Kind of the way we tell them about Santa Claus??? Or do I go the straight Biblical route and say "Once upon a time God decided he was mad at all the people except a man named Noah..." oh no, I could just imagine the weird questions that would follow. I decided to leave God out altogether. Instead I said, "Once upon a time there was a big storm and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights and made a big flood, but a man named Noah built a big ship called an ark and he let all the animals go on it with him, and they floated on the seas until the rain stopped and then they all got out. And we're going to a museum to see Noah's Ark." I'm sure that made no sense at all.
The Skirball Center is 140 miles south of us. You can't just walk into Noah's Ark -- you buy tickets for a particular time. So we had to figure out when we could get there. Oh, the endless joys of living in Ridgecrest. At 9:00 this morning I looked at the website and decided we could be there by 1:00 (4 hours), so I bought 4 tickets for that time. Then we packed the car and left at about 9:40. Two and a half hour drive, roughly -- we got to the Skirball just after noon.
The Skirball is just down the road from the glorious Getty Museum, and I was expecting it to be similar. I realized after we arrived that that was silly. The Getty is colossal, grander than all other museums. The Skirball is on a more reasonable scale. For example, we were able to park about 20 feet from the elevators. We went up to the main lobby and found the restaurant and food cart. Since we had time before our tour started, we bought sandwiches and ate a nice lunch in the outside courtyard. Boos were very bad: among other things they took off their sandals, walked on the rim of a pond (and got yelled at by a guard), and wouldn't eat the nice lunch. It was not an auspicious beginning.
Then it was time for us to go to Noah's Ark. We were given large stickers to wear that showed our time slot (you can only stay for 2 hours, so the staff needs to know when you went in) and the boos did NOT want to wear the stickers. I had to chase Baby A up and down a staircase to put his on. Rocket Boy tried putting Baby B's sticker on his back, which made him mad. Meanwhile all the other families headed for Noah's Ark were peacefully putting on their stickers, no worries. Sometimes I hate my children. Finally we got the stickers on. Here we are on our way to the gallery, all wearing our stickers.
I had studied the Noah's Ark website extensively beforehand, but still really had no idea of what to expect. One thing I read that kind of bugged me was that the animals in the ark are made of recycled materials -- flyswatters, piano keyboards, boxing gloves, you name it. That sounded too PC to me -- I wanted true-to-life animals.
OK, let's just say right up front that I was wrong, the animals are amazingly wonderful, and the whole Noah's Ark exhibit is simply fabulous. I was so impressed. There are a series of rooms -- the first room is the outside of the ark, the next two rooms are inside the ark, and the last room is a place to do crafts -- we didn't spend any time there. We spent the most time in the first room, where you can turn wheels and pull levers to make thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. Now remember, Baby A is afraid of storms, particularly lightning. This room was so good for him! He spent so much time working it, working out his fears. Here are the boys manipulating the rain machine.
In the second room there are puppets, little rooms to crawl in, and a giant toy Noah's Ark with lots of little animals inside. The boys played with that for a long time.
The third room had a sort of rope ladder thing that kids could climb into and then walk all around up above the adults. This photo shows Baby A walking down out of it and you can barely see Baby B up on the second level with the penguins.
My favorite part of the whole thing was the animals -- those animals made out of recycled and repurposed materials that I thought I wouldn't like. They're incredible! I couldn't stop taking pictures of them. Here's the lion and the lamb, at the door between the third and fourth rooms.
No matter how much of a pain it was for us to get there and back -- and believe me, it was a pain -- the trip back home was AWFUL -- this exhibit was worth seeing. If you happen to find yourself in Los Angeles with a couple of hours to kill, I HIGHLY recommend it, especially if you have a little person or two along. SO FUN.
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