Photos from the Trip 2 - California

At Balboa Park

I went to Balboa Park while I was in California.  It is an amazing place.  I could have spent a week just in this one area and still would not have seen everything.  There is a lot to see there.  Of course, I wanted to go to the Min Gei International Museum.  The first floor of a museum had a large exhibit of carved walking sticks.  There was some amazing workmanship there.  This exhibit will be on display until January 1th, 2016. If you like walking sticks, this exhibit is not to be missed.

When we arrived, I asked permission to take photos.  The lady at the desk told me I was allowed to take photos but not to use the flash.  She thanked me for asking.  I was pleased to be allowed to take photographs at all.  Some museums will not allow you to take pictures.  It is always a good idea to check.

I took a lot of detail pictures of the walking sticks for inspiration.  I did remember to take a few pictures of whole walking sticks.  I took so many pictures that I was afraid that I was going to run out of memory, so I did try not to go to wild on the first exhibit I saw.  Most of the walking sticks were from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. 

Relief carving on a walking stick.

The exhibit I liked best was on the second floor.  It was an exhibit called Procession.  This exhibit is the work of Alice Hudson.    She has made 130 figures from found objects.  The figures include dragons, woodland folk, ghosts, and all sorts of people.  As someone who works with found objects, I really enjoyed looking at the figures and understanding how they were made.  I wish I had taken more pictures of these dolls, but the lighting on them was not very good for photography.

Another exhibit was an exhibit of crafts from each of the fifty states.  Some of the crafts were older, and some contemporary.  This covered a lot of craft territory:  dolls, pottery, glass work, beading both older and modern, basketry, etc.  There was a wall for school children to mark which state's craft interested them the most.

After lunch, we headed over to the Air and Space Museum.  The guys wanted to see something a little different from our morning museum tour.  This museum had everything from early aircraft to actual space craft.  Most of the exhibits are roped off, as these are rare aircraft, but some allowed you to get close to or get into the cockpit.

I think one of the really impressive exhibits here was actually the wall of people associated with developing aviation.  Each person had a portrait: either painted or photographed and a biography telling what they did in aviation history.  It really gave you a good overview of aviation history and just how risky an enterprise it was to get humanity off the ground and into the air.

One of the other attractions at the museum was that they had flight simulators available.  (For a fee of course.)  Depending upon the type of flight you wished to take it cost five to eight dollars for a flight.  My husband and I did not partake, but we enjoyed watching our son take a turn in one.  The whole module moves and spins.  If you put the plane into a dive or stall it, the module will flip over and head towards the ground.  The person in the module could also fire at other flying targets, so that you would get the feel of what it is really like to try to pilot a plane and try to shoot at a moving target at the same time.  There were monitors on each side of the simulator.  One module gave you an inside view of what the person in the module was doing.  The other gave a view of what was being targeted and how many hits were made.  It was great fun to watch.

The flight simulator.

There was so much more to Balboa Park.  There was some amazing architecture.  It had an outdoor amphitheater that had the worlds largest outdoor organ.  There were eleven or twelve more museums that we did not even have time to get to go to because we just did not have the time.  There are also botanical gardens there I think, and tram rides around the park.  It is a huge place.  If you ever get the chance, you should visit this place.