The Lawrence Hall of Science

My sister was given a handful of free kid’s passes to The Lawrence Hall of Science which is situated at the tippy top of a very tall hill in Berkley which overlooks the entire bay area.

But first my Dad treated us to breakfast at a favorite little restaurant in Moraga, a half an hour’s drive from home over a windy Redwood tree lined road.

What do you do while waiting for your breakfast to come?  Take pictures of course!

This one below was a total accident but I had fun playing with it in Photoshop anyway.

The drive from Moraga up to the tippy top of the hill in Berkley where the science center is located is breathtaking.  As a photography nut I wanted to jump out at every turn and get a picture from every angle.  But it wasn’t practical to pull over on the way up so I did all my picture taking from the vantage point of the parking lot once we got there.  I remember going to the Lawrence Hall of Science as a child on field trips with school but I don’t remember caring a stitch about the spectacular bird’s eye view of my stomping grounds below.  Maybe it’s because I wasn’t tall enough to see over the barriers or something.  Maybe I was just too busy hamming it up with my friends on the bus.  Whatever the reason, this visit to the Lawrence Hall of Science was memorable for me simply because of the beautiful clear view of the place I call home.

Beautiful.

Then there was the science center itself.  The kids had a great time and we had fun watching them have a great time.

For some reason the picture below reminds me of one of two things.  A 3D ultrasound or Hiroshima.

Ahhh, wonderful little nerds in training.

I had fun taking interesting pictures.  This giant computerized globe was a fun photographic subject.  I like the EXIT signs on either side of the depiction of planetary temperatures.  It seemed very Al Gorish to me.  As in, “The planet has a fever – you will find emergency exits on either side of the world.  Please calmly make your way along the lighted path to the nearest exit.  Thank you and enjoy your journey.”

Moon…

Topographical…

2004 Tsunami

City lights of the world…

Then there was the funky concave mirror…

Space junk…

Air rocket…

The fun was cut short when a certain little someone had a run-in with a mud puddle in the outdoor play area.

Poor little dude had to ride home in his underwear wrapped only in an A’s blanket.

We decided to umm…. take a “short cut” on the way home and drive through Berkley.  As you can imagine it was more like a long cut but it was fun to drive through Berkley as I hadn’t been there since high school when my best friend and I used to take BART down there just to go thrift store shopping or music shopping.  One of my memorable moments in Berkley is when my best friend and I were walking down the street and not abnormally a panhandler approached us and asked us for money.  Only this one was an honest panhandler.  He made no effort to hide his enormous stash of cash but it hung openly in a coffee can tied to a string around his neck, like Bob Wiley’s goldfish, Gil, in What About Bob.  He was not only not withholding how much cash he had brought in through his loafish ways, he also declared at the outset what the funds were purposed for, “Can I have some money?  I’m gonna spend it all on drugs and alcohol.”  I thought it was rather upstanding of him to put the truth out there like that.  But I still didn’t give him any money.

Anyways, all that to say that we drove through Berkley and I ogled the gorgeous homes.  Whatever else there is to be said about Berkley, the residential areas are nothing short of gorgeous.  Drive by pictures cannot do it justice but as we were taking a long cut already we couldn’t afford the time to get out and take decent pictures.

Look at all that vegetation.  I am a big fan of vegetation.  Here on the edge of the northern prairies there aren’t copious amounts of vegetation so I relish in the year round green when I am back in the Bay Area.

And that about does it for our day at the science center.  We wore ourselves out pretty good so that when we got home we collapsed in front of the TV and/or took naps the rest of the afternoon.