Day 3, part 2

After running into Maya and mom again, we parted ways.  Off we went to find the top floor of the museum, which supposedly has the best view in Denver.
We went through the bird exhibit and finally found the elevators.  Up we go...we finally arrive at the terrace!  I take 2 or 3 pictures, we may have been there about 15 seconds when a couple of museum guards came onto the terrace to announce that they had to close the terrace due to the lightning strikes in the approaching storm.  Fine, fine, I snap a few more pictures, then some more while we wait for the elevator to get to us.  Damn it.

So back down we went.  We ended up on the second floor again, in an atrium that overlooked the area we'd been above on the terrace.
We thought we'd hang out for a minute and watch the storm...

And....there's Maya!

Apparently Maya and mom had the same idea.  They'd just finished at the pirate exhibit with some booty.  So we hung out with them awhile longer and visited while the storm stormed outside.
Then we said we were going to go finish our visit and Maya asked us if we wanted to come with them.  She became our tour guide.  She mostly ignored me and lavished all her energy on the Mister.  And on our anniversary!  What a jerk.  ;o)

Maya tries to dock a space shuttle

And then just jumps on Mister's lap and looks at what he was looking at

Massive globe.  Bestill my heart.  -sigh

Meteorite--probably pretty hard to lift, but kooks are out there

cool meteorite

Mister & I thought the patterns on this resembled the Allspark from the Transformers.

Swimming through the air.

Following the space exhibit, we joined Maya in the gift shop.  I wandered about while Maya showed things to the Mister.  He bought her a rock and gave it to her as we were saying our goodbyes.  Oh, if only I'd gotten a picture of her face!  She just lit up and looked overjoyed that he'd gotten her a rock!  Such a small thing, but I bet that's her favorite thing for awhile....

We headed back to the hotel after that and then to a delish dinner at a local Italian restaurant.  It's owned by brothers that moved to the area from Italy years ago.  We shared a bottle of champagne to toast to "10 more years--we don't want to get carried away" and enjoyed the food and then went back to the hotel.

I will say now--yay for air conditioning!  While we were in Denver it rained every night and then managed to get into the 90's every day.  So the humidity was pretty high with the temps and the zoo felt like a sauna when we went.