The Field Museum, Chicago, IL

Thursday 24 July

The Field Museum is immense. We started exploring the Egyptian Mummy section, which had 28 or more mummified specimens, some still in their sarcophagi, others wrapped in bandages, and some unwrapped to show the skin that was pitch black - literally, because the bodies were preserved in part by being painted in tar. We saw mummies of men, women, children, and even one that must have been of a premature baby, it was so tiny. Freaky. We also saw a giant boat that had been discovered buried near a pyramid, possibly to take the soul to the afterlife.

After that we explored the Hall of Gems, which had a beautiful collection of crystals and jewellery. We appreciated having already visited the crystallography exhibit at the Albany Museum over the school holidays to recognise the different shapes of the crystals in their matrix that were on display. Then we headed to the Hall of Jade, which had displays of many different things that had been made from jade by the Chinese over the centuries of their civilisation. We even saw jade sword blades, but I didn't think they would have been much use in a real fight. There was a half metre chunk of jade ore we could touch and I thought of the jade necklace I had made when I was a kid from a piece of ore my family acquired from Cowell, SA, on a holiday with my family when I was a kid.

Then it was on to the dinosaur display! The kids we excited to see so many dinosaur skeletons on display once I reassured Sam that they were all connected by metal rods and wouldn't fall apart on us. In the main hall of the Field Museum is "Sue", the most complete - and apparently most fought over - fossil skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered. We also saw fossils of mastodons, triceratops, stegosaurus, and something Anna thinks might have been a spinosaurus, with a big row of spines rising from its spine, which would have held a sail of skin in life, presumably.
The last section we saw I the Field Museum contained plant and animal specimens from all around the world. We appreciated the displays of all the amazing large animals of the Americas, which dwarf the only two sizeable Australian animals, the emu and kangaroo. Here they have caribou, elk, moose, bears of a large range of sizes, as well as wolves and cougars (mountain lions).

The plant display was interesting because it focused on the plants used to manufacture a variety of objects. We saw the plants together with their fibres and the products made from them, such as cotton (cloth), jute (ropes), and agave (Panama hats). We also saw coffee plants and beans, cacao (from which chocolate is made), and tea.

By the time we left the museum, we'd been there for nearly five hours, but we could easily have spent five days, there was so much to see, read, learn and explore.

We arrived back at our hotel room in time to wake Joshua up, have a short rest for the rest of us, and then walk north through the city to the Chicago a river. We walked along the riverbank for a kilometre or so, admiring the strange pale jade green of the water, which we concluded must be the result of the water coming from snow melt. We passed the Trump Tower, sighted the Chicago Tribune building, and finally arrived at the Navy Pier, where we enjoyed Italian for dinner. we finally managed to get the tipping thing right, and enjoyed pizza, pasta and gelato for dessert, with unlimited soft drink which we all took grateful advantage of. It was too late to explohe Fre the pier and the Children's Museum which is located there, and to be honest, we were all museum'd out. But dinner was delicious and the taxi ride home took only 5 minutes, despite the hour and a half we had taken to walk to the pier. Everyone was in bed at a somewhat reasonable time, for once.