February 20th, 2012

A few weeks ago, Mom and Caleb went to the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin to look at trains. I wish I could have gone with, but these pictures almost make up for it!

This time we are going to show pictures of the trains that are in a huge building. These are the trains that they’ve cleaned the outsides. There actually were a few of them that you could go inside and look too!

This is the Dwight D. Eisenhower, a steam locomotive that General Eisenhower used to travel around Great Britain and Europe during World War II.

Caleb really liked the logo!

This is the Union Pacific Big Boy. It is the longest steam train ever made. It is 134 feet (41 meters) long and weighs 1.25 million pounds (0.6 million kilograms).

Mom says that it was HUGE.

This is a Pennsylvania Railroad CG1. It is an electric train!

That is how it connected to the power lines above the rail lines.

Next time, we’ll show you pictures of the trains that were left outside in a covered shed.

February 16th, 2012

The AG girls aren’t very happy about the whole thing, but Mom has given Wren her own blog. Mom says that Wren wants to write to Miranda, a pixie that lives in Colorado, and she doesn’t want those messages to clog up my blog. It is going to be both here, on blogspot, and on WordPress as an experiment.

Don’t worry—they’re really not mad at Wren or Mom—they mostly now know that the idea of having a separate blog isn’t totally out of this world as it was before! Mom hopes that she can keep up on two blogs—although the Wren one probably won’t get updated as often as this one, since I’ve got a lot more adventures to talk about!

February 15th, 2012

A few weeks ago, Mom and Caleb went on another trip. This time they went to the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay. I love trains! I wish I could have gone, but these pictures almost make up for it!

My mom went here when she was a little girl. The outside looks pretty much the same, but the inside has changed a lot! There were three different parts of the museum. We’re going to show the pictures from the first part today.

This is a diorama detailing the making of the railroad. Mom liked the horses in the background.

They had a few models of trains. There are different scales of train models, so they’re different sizes.

This was about as old as they got. Mom thought that they should have more about the history of railroading, rather then the railroad after the 1900s.

This one was pretty cool. They had the full sized engine and a few cars outside! It was called the Aerotrain.

These are called drumheads. On the back of a train’s caboose, they had a neon size that proclaimed the name of the train. A man named Frederick Bauer collected them and donated it to the museum.

This was Mom’s favorite!
Next time, I’ll tell you about the big trains that are inside the building. They are all cleaned up and shiny!

February 11th, 2012

This will be the last of our Milwaukee Public Museum posts. This is more of a collection of the odd things that we found interesting, but didn’t want to have an entire post about!

This is an Egyptian mummy—well, his sarcophagus —named Djed-Hor. Googling it came up with an interesting article about him. He might have gone through brain surgery when he was alive!

This is a reproduction of the Rosetta Stone. It’s amazing how one piece of stone can reveal so much about history!

And finally, this is a reproduction of an Asian statue that Mom found in the Asian wing. It’s supposed to be a lion! I think he looks very fierce!

February 8th, 2012

A few weeks ago, Mom went with her parents to the Milwaukee Public Museum and took a lot of pictures! We’ve got two more bunches that we want to share with you.

In the Milwaukee Public Museum, there is a special wing called the Puelicher Butterfly Wing. Among the many exhibits talking about biodiversity and saving endangered insects, there is a hothouse room full of greenery and butterflies! According to Wikipedia, it is called a butterfly zoo!

We don’t know any of the names of these butterflies, but they’re so pretty I don’t think it matters!

They were all different colors. These black and orange ones were more likely to stay still long enough so Mom could take a picture.

Her parents were in quite the hurry, so she didn’t take too many pictures! This is another place that Mom hopes to come back and visit!

February 5th, 2012

A few weeks ago, my mom went with her parents—and Caleb, to the Milwaukee Public Museum. Being my mom, she took a lot of pictures and we wanted to share them all with you! Since we can’t share all of them (she took 186 pictures!), we decided to share the best of!!

So this time, we’re going to share pictures of the fossils/skeletons that we liked.

This is a plesiosaurus! It turns out that it is a genus of dinosaur, so Mom doesn’t know which species it is. There is a plaque near that tree in the lower left corner that says this plesiosaurus’ name is Heidi!

She was hanging in the main entryway near the mammoth! Look at that long neck!

This is a torosaurus. Mom and I really like dinosaurs, and this fellow was quite the looker!

This is a dromaeosaurus. This is another genus of dinosaur, not species. I guess they don’t think people will go to Wikipedia and look stuff up after they go home!

This is a shovel tusked elephant from China. He or she was housed in a large area with many different fossils, so we didn’t get a good photo of the rest of it. I wouldn’t want to meet him/her on a dark night! Very scary!

The fossil in the foreground is a moa. Mom says that the next time she goes there, she’s going to take notes so she can remember which kind of moa it was! I’m impressed with how tall it was! The skeleton in the background is of a mastodon!

I hope you all have been enjoying our museum pictures! Mom loves taking pictures, and I love posting about them, so it all works out!

February 1st, 2012

A week or so ago, my mom went with Caleb and her parents to the Milwaukee Public Museum to see the Cleopatra exhibit. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow photos inside the exhibit, but they let you take pictures in the museum itself. So Mom, being the person she is, took LOTS of pictures! I thought we would share some of them with you!

The Milwaukee Public Museum itself is from 1882. This means that they have lots of exhibits that sort of show different time periods of museum exhibits themselves. The museum moved into it’s present day building in 1965, and the grand part of the museum sort of dates to then. Most of the museum itself is divided up into different continents. In the wings, they have dioramas of different parts of the world. Mom was mostly interested in the animals.

This is a photo of one of the exhibits from the Americas. This is a manatee from Florida.

This is an albatross. It was in the exhibit with the Artic animals. Albatross are really big birds. Mom says that she wants to see one in real life someday!

This is a rhino from the African exhibit. We like rhinos around here—Mom saw a rhino in a zoo when she went to Kansas City a long time ago.

Mom took lots of pictures of the different animals in the dioramas. We’re not going to make this post any longer, but if you want to see them they’re on her Facebook page. We’ve got some more posts lined up!