I'm sure we're not alone in this, but we've hit the COVID Stay Home wall over here. Despite lots and lots of trips to Phipps and a bajillion or so hikes through the wilderness, the girls are cagey. It's gotten to the point that Alexis begs me to go buy Starbucks just so she can ride along, even though she doesn't want a drink herself. The weather, of course, is compounding this problem because we can't really go enjoy a hike at this point. I'm all good with cold and snow, but this little stretch of legit winter is pushing it.
So I concocted a plan. After much contemplation and an insane amount of research, I decided we would go to a museum or two. The Carnegie Museums, to be exact. They're open and operating at 15% capacity, which is about as scaled back as you can get. They also require masks and blah, blah, blah. They're following the rules. And if we got there and it was too crowded? No big deal. We're collectively addicted to Boba Tea from Fuku anyway, so we would just order fancy drinks on the app and walk down to pick them up.
We walked through the museums AND got our Boba tea. It was a good day.
Because I know other people are struggling with this exact scenario - a need to go SOMEWHERE but also wanting to not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, my general assessment of the Natural History and Art Museum is that they're trying, but they're not on the same level as Phipps. At Phipps, it's genuinely possible to make it all the way through without encountering a single human. That's not true at Carnegie. The difference is that Phipps is able to set up one-way routing all the way through. The Natural History side of the museum has tried, but not really succeeded at the same thing. We skipped most of the Hall of Geology and the entire collection of dead birds because both areas were just too crowded. There was someone outside of the Egypt area controlling capacity, which was good, but generally there were a few too many places where people had congregated and nobody trying to reign things in.
I think because it has a more open floor plan, the Art History side was much better.
Obviously.
Someone should probably explain to Mila that the painting behind her is kind of a big deal and maybe she should take advantage of there not being a single other person nearby as she enjoys it. Or she can just sprawl across the bench and complain that she would rather be looking at dinosaur bones. WHATEVER.
(We went on a Saturday. I have no doubt that it would be better on a weekday. It still gets a thumbs up from me, just a thumbs up with a caveat that it's important to be flexible with the path you take through the place.)