Greensboro Science Center

SmugMug Daily Link

The boys, Madi, and I went to the Greensboro Science Center today.  This was our first trip to this museum/zoo/aquarium.  It was kindof a combination of the NC Zoo, The Museum of Life and Science in Durham, the Natural Sciences Museum in Raleigh, and the NC Aquarium at Fort Fisher.  Wow!  We really enjoyed our day!

 By far, the newly opened SCIQUARIUM was the kids' favorite part.  Johnny and Madi were fascinated by the stingray 'touching area' at the Hands-On Harbor.  Joey loved the dome that allowed kids to be 'inside' the otter habitat.  We all enjoyed the Fishing Cat which we initially thought was an ocelot.  And it was super exciting to see the penguins swimming about with their little name tags.

We also thoroughly enjoyed the zoo area outside.  The tigers tried to mate while we were watching:-)  The wolves were active.  We got to see gibbons which are a near extinct species that we'd never seen before.  The kids were excited about the petting zoo too.  It was a casual 90 minute stroll on a cloudy but lovely fall day.

I was impressed that we were allowed to carry in a small fabric cooler wtih no harassment and that there were plenty of picnic tables in the zoo area to eat at.  The museum has a Fresh Market Cafe, but there was no pressure to eat there.

For some reason today, the kids were not very interested in geology or palentology today.  The older part of the museum has a very nice display of glowing rocks, fossils, and dinosaur bones, but I guess at this point, my kids have seen one dinosaur too many.

The only con to our visit was all the school groups there in the morning.  Just a bit crowded and sometimes large groups make any museum hard to navigate.  For any museum, I think it's worth seeing how many field trip groups are planning to visit on the day you're going.  Lesson learned although I think we would have gone anyway.

 We got in for half price today at about $6 a person.  The museum coordinates with our NC Zoo membership.  Cool.  The museum also has it's own membership which I'm sure is a good deal if you live closeby.  As it was, between a tank of gas and admission, our visit was a tad pricey even with bringing in our own food.

As we left, the kids were saying how much they'd like to go back.  I'm sure we will some day.