Most of our road trip plans involved outdoor activities. Since I'm a California girl, it didn't occur to me that rain might interfere with our plans.
Well, we're not in California anymore. New York's weather forecast called for thunderstorms all day, so we had to come up with a backup plan. Instead of driving to Niagara Falls today, we headed into Rochester to visit the Strong Museum of Play.
We gave each of the kids $10 at the beginning of the trip, and told them they could spend it any way they liked (and pocket what was left at the end). Anna and Todd chose to spend part of their money on a carousel ride at the museum. Anna says that $1 ride is one of her favorite parts of our trip.
Some of the museum displays asked thought-provoking questions, such as, "Is a motorcycle a toy?" Daddy and Daniel say yes; Anna says no. By the way, don't assume those lighted numbers are an accurate tally. We saw kids voting a dozen times apiece, and each counter resets when it reaches 9999.
The museum also had a butterfly garden, which was my favorite part of the day. I could have spent hours watching dozens of exotic butterflies flutter around the greenhouse. In a world where you're lucky to see a single butterfly in a day, I was enchanted by the sight of so many of these beautiful creatures flying around us, often just a few inches away.
The kids also enjoyed the temporary Wild Kratts exhibit, where you could color a fish on paper, scan it with their special scanner, then watch the image swim around the ocean reef projected on the wall.
Our last stop was the pinball section. Daniel bought a bunch of tokens and played nearly every machine in the room, but Anna and Todd preferred an old school machine called Swing Time (in the background of the above photo). I stuck with the Lord of the Rings machine.
Of course, Daddy's favorite machine was the Star Wars one. :)
We played pinball until the museum closed, and more than once I thought of my Dad. When I was a kid, my family would go to Camelot for pizza every Friday, then Dad would buy us tokens to play the arcade games. My dad loved to use his tokens to play the pinball machines.
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