Day 1 - Atlanta to NYC
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Before our travel package started, we had to get ourselves from Atlanta to New York City. Our flight to Iceland wasn't until Wednesday evening, so we decided to fly up to JFK on Wednesday morning and go into the city for the afternoon. We got into JFK around 10:30 am, and our first order of business was to find a place to store our bags for the day. It's harder than it used to be prior to 9/11, but we did eventually find a manned bag check closet in the terminal and handed over most of our luggage.
Since it was winter and kind of chilly, we decided to visit the Natural History Museum. We did a bit of train-hopping (a long walk to the Airtrain followed by the E train and the B train) to get to the museum. Of all the things to remember, the stairs out of the subway station absolutely reeked of bum pee. Welcome to New York, I guess. The museum admission is "pay what you want," but we waited in line and paid the suggested admission, which was something like $22 each. We checked our coats and backpacks and grabbed some lunch in the museum cafeteria, then got down to a whirlwind tour of the museum highlights.
We started out with a gallery of minerals, meteorites, and gemstones. We saw a meteorite from the Henbury Crater, a remote site in the Australian Outback that we visited in person on an earlier trip. We also saw the Star of India, the largest star sapphire ever found (and donated to the museum by J.P. Morgan). The gallery itself was a little run down and threadbare, but the exhibits were interesting.
Next, we headed for the dinosaur bones. Those galleries were much newer and were fascinating – the best exhibits of their kind that I've ever seen. We took our time exploring them, and then quickly spun through some of the other galleries until it was time to reverse our train ride back to the airport.
Back at JFK, we reclaimed our bags, ate some dinner, and settled in at the gate to wait for our 8 pm flight.
