Travels in the 2nd half

  There are many reasons to visit Ithaca NY. The Finger Lakes are beautiful. There are many great hiking opportunities a short drive away. There are wonderful wineries. But one thing often overlooked is a great natural history museum - The Museum of the Earth. The Museum of the Earth is run by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), in affiliation with Cornell University.The museum opened in 2003 with a focus on earth science and the history of life on our planet. PRI has one of the largest collection of fossils in the United States, and they are shown to great effect in the museum.   When you get to the museum you enter into a small hall. On your left is the skeleton of an Atlantic Right Whale.This is not a fossil, but is the remains of whale that died in 1999, when it became caught in fishing gear.  When you leave the lobby, you will walk down a long ramp to the main floor of the museum. Along the center of the ramp is a beautiful artwork titled “Rock of Ages, ...

  Visiting a seasonal resort community out of season can be kind of a crap-shoot. The crowds are absent, but so are most of the things that you might expect to enjoy. So, when I visited Block Island in mid-April, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Block Island is ten square miles of beautiful land and views, sitting nine miles south of Rhode Island. It was formed by the same glacial movements that created Long Island. Before Europeans arrived, it was a summer settlement for local Indian peoples who grew corn, beans and squash, while hunting deer and catching fish. In 1624, Dutch explorer Adriaen Block named the island for himself, and so it has been for five hundred years. Block Island has been continuously inhabited by European descendants since the 17th century, but it wasn’t until permanent harbors were built during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that it became a summer destination. Today there are about one thousand permanent residents, and about an additional two thousand ...

  John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) was one of the biggest financiers and bankers of the “gilded age”. He was a driving force in the creation of many of the largest companies on the United States. In the process he accumulated a fortune that would be the equivalent of $1.2billion on today’s dollars. Near the end of his life he used much of his fortune to amass a collection of books and artworks. JohnPierpontMorgan.jpgderivative work: Beao, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons In 1902, he decided to build a library to hold his collection. He built an Italian style building based on villas from the 16th century. He built the library amid a block of land on which he had built homes for children. In 1924, J.P. Morgan Jr. turned his father’s collection and the library itself into a public institution. The Morgan Library and Museum continued to expand it collection and its space. Over the decades, it bought the surrounding land and built annexes and offices. The buildings underwent a ma...