Cardiff National Museum (Brayden I found a dinosaur!)

The National Museum in Cardiff. 

This is a good place to visit on a bit of a cold, wet day. We headed here for a Saturday's entertainment and weren't disappointed.

The Museum starts with a tour through the development of Wales from its first beginnings up til now. 

We got to touch old rocks and read about the process. Did you know that the land the earth is made up of started at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere? We didn't. We learnt about the growth of organisms and plants. It really is amazing how our earth developed from such small things. We managed to find some mammals and then some dinosaurs. 

So Brayden, here are some dinosaurs that Hannah and I thought you might be interested in. 

An actual Diplodocus - well it's bones anyway.

A scary T-rex head. Eeeeek!

And then we found a mammoth.

It turns out they wandered around the U.K. back in the day. I think I always imagined them in big areas that were cold, like Russia and Siberia. But obviously the earth was generally cold, that's why it was called the ice age. I guess you don't really THINK about these things too much depth until you are looking at a mammoth in a museum and the penny drops.

They are quite big.

After that, we wandered around looking at art and other old things. These are a few Picasso pieces.

I got the feeling that Dan and Hannah were a bit bored with old things. Even though a Rembrandt was just hanging around behind them. 

We did find an activity that both children had a go at. They had to create their own piece of Landscape Welsh art. 

Did you know that there were a couple of Welsh sisters who collected art of people they thought were pretty good? Well, they did, and then they gifted the art to the Museum. And because of this very generous gift we got to see some artists work that we hadn't come across. 

Dagar - he was a favourite when I was young. 

Monet - I love Monet and they were even better in real life. So beautiful and with such depth. Sigh, if only we could take on home ...

Renoir

 Van Gogh - also very stunning. 

And this incredible piece of sculpture by Rodin called 'The Kiss'. It is part of a series he did based on Dante's Inferno. It is of Paolo and Francesca before Paolo is killed by Francesca's husband (Paolo's brother). Sad but beautiful. This is a bronze, there is a larger, marble one in the Rodin Museum in Paris. We drove past the museum there and saw the back of his 'Thinker' statue. 

By this time, everyone was a bit done. Can you tell?

We wandered back to the car, passing through a memorial garden that was next to the road we parked the blue Skoda, our mighty beast.

Took a moment to smell a rose (or take a picture if you are Hannah) and headed for home in Ponty.