Ed wanted to take off some time and show us around, and we thought he'd enjoy it, and no skin off our nose, so Tuesday was the first of our guided tour days. I wanted, no surprise here, to go to the Carnegie Museum.

As Ed drove us through the Liberty Tunnel, he pointed out that Pittsburgh is the only city with an entrance. I could have pointed out Sacramento's backdoor, down 12th street, but it's rather spoiled by the tracks and the homeless services. Sacramento's original front door, across the bridge from West Sacramento, looking down Capitol Mall to the Capitol, is nice, but it's no longer the main drag. Ed is, apparently, right. And the view is really nice.

Part of the Carnegie building is the FIRST Carnegie library. As one who spent many happy hours in the Laramie library, courtesy of Mr. Carnegie, I was pleased to see it. Carnegie gave away $360 million to charity, which was a lot of money in those days, to quote Daddy Warbucks.

It turned out that this was the only museum on our trip that didn't care about our memberships at home. We actually had to pay to get in. It's OK, though, they have dinosaurs!
But first we needed to look at the North transept of the Cathedral of St-Andre at Bordeaux. Very nice, now where is Dinosaur Hall? There was a Sepphoris mosaic on display. They'd rolled it up on something like Tyvek to transport. Um, that's really nice, but I want to see the dinosaurs!

The Carnegie has the type specimen of Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is the one that defines the species, what a T-rex is. The old one is standing upright, dragging its tail, obviously a slow, though terrifying, beast. There's a new one, right in the lobby, (probably a cast, actually) in running position, tail up, head down. It looks really fast and really really scary.

The old one

And the new!

There is one of the brontosaur/apatosaurs that was pulled out of Como Bluff in Wyoming. The American Museum of Natural History took two, and eventually Dr. Knight, at the U. of Wyoming, was able to get one back and build a museum around it. It's not as gorgeous as the Carnegie, of course, but not bad.

There was a robot in there having a nervous breakdown, saying the same thing over and over.

        
Another view of the type t-rex and of a velociraptor. At the gift store, I bought a "Dead End" sign with a Tyrannosaur on it, which now graces the house at the end of the driveway.

Finally, thinking we would be able to look down from the gallery, we left the dinos. As it turned out, the gallery was blocked off, but there's quite a bit else to see. We went to the Hillman hall of minerals, which was spectacular, and through the natural history exhibits. Ed waxed nostalgic over the old cases, which we found on the third floor.
We saw Robert Adam cabinetry, architecture, and Egypt. The school groups (the kids in the dinosaurs were with parents) were mostly in Egypt and Native Americans (of course, since this was near to Thanksgiving). We took a turn through the temporary gallery displaying Christopher Snow. Ick. All it was was posters with bad words. This got us into the art gallery where we zipped through. Ed had tales of the Warhol museum which he'd helped build, and Rich and I were topping him with some of the sights at the San Francisco MOMA and they were practically running through the pictures. However, I did recogize Impressionists and VanGogh and Lichenstein and Haring, so I enjoyed it.

Then we finished at the Native American display, where I found out that the Iroquois made souvenirs for Niagara Falls last century.

Then, it was a last goodbye to the tyrannosaur in the lobby, (that's Ed with it) and off to the Science Center.

To be continued...