Museum Campus, Part 1

Sunday we set aside for that tourist favorite, the Museum Campus: the three famous nature museums that nobody can actually manage to do justice to in a day but if you have a pass that covers them all you just have to try. We rode the hop-on/hop-off tour bus all the way to the Adler Planetarium stop because why walk the length of that promontory twice?

The Adler is a beautiful, historic building with a rather small quantity of mundane material on display that screams "School Field Trip." We took in a couple of sky shows, which were enjoyable enough despite being in small theaters with boring modern projectors instead of the classic dome that you see on top of the building here, which is no longer open to the public. Do they use it for storage?  Sad. Anyway, the outside of this museum is better than the inside.


But the real reason for journeying to the end of the peninsula is for the spectacular skyline view. Holey moley!


Then on to the Shedd, which is a perfectly lovely aquarium that is packed to the rafters on a beautiful summer weekend. Richard enjoyed it quite a bit more than I did, having more tolerance for crowds and noise. My favorite part was actually these curious inflated eyeballs hovering outside the entrance, put there to deter the local redwing blackbirds from dive bombing the tourists. 


My favorite thing inside was probably the Seussian Sand Eels, which I didn't get a picture of. But these extremely classy sea horse things were pretty neat too. How can something this flashy also be this well camouflaged? Although I'm sure it is happier surrounded by its matching native kelp, I think it would look better as a subtly jeweled piece of wearable art on a nicely contrasting plain  background.