Summer Adventure Challenge Blog: Hudson Highlands Nature Museum

Well this was supposed to be fun. It looked like fun. This museum has "Discovery Quests" on the weekends where you buy these guidebooks and then go on some marked trails and fill in the book and stuff. There are four trails, Pond Quest, Field Quest, Woodland Quest, and Hiking Quest. Super fun right? Well not if one of your kids happens to be Mary in a really really bad mood. Okay, it wasn't completely horrible...but kind of. Emma was really sweet and patient, she didn't fuss once about walking. She said it was hot but she didn't say it in a fussy drama voice so wahoo.

We chose the Field Quest because this huge group just went on the pond one and it was pretty crowded over there. I guess the first mistake was completely mine...I misread the map right at the beginning and actually took us on the wrong trail (in my defense the red flag I was supposed to find really was marking the wrong trail). But I figured it out quick and we retraced our steps. We did see some cool flowers and stuff. Once we were on the right trail I thought things would get better. Mary had already been doing some pretty significant fussing at me. The thing is, they didn't get better. At all.

The trail was only 1/2 mile on completely flat ground. It was pretty much a big path someone had mowed through a field. The guidebook was alright...some of the things were fun like circling different plants we can see and listening for sounds. The "Quest" part is filling in these rhymes and then doing a word puzzle at the end. Half of these rhymes Emma could not get at ALL. And some of them weren't even rhymes. So that was a little lame. But some of the activities were good. And I would like to do the other ones sans Mary completely hating me. Don't let her cute smile fool you in some of these pictures...they all involved some sort of bribe (she's holding marshmallows in the one of her by herself). Mostly I carried her on the trail and the girl is HEAVY. Solid little thing. On the way home we played "What was your favorite part of our outing?" And Emma said she liked finding the flowers and doing the rhymes. Mary said, "You have to help me...I can't remember."

There is also another part of this museum with exhibits, it is about 1/2 a mile away and at this point it was get home. But I'd like to go try that too.