Visiting the Intrepid Air Sea and Space Museum

We were jammy enough to get to go to New York this May half term, which was fantastic. Rian did really well on his first city break – I even managed to get him in The Met twice, even though he was more interested in all the Central Park parks! The favourite excursion for him though was the Intrepid Air Sea and Space Museum.

Now, there’s nothing particularly intrepid about visiting the museum – it’s not in a remote jungle or anything, it’s on one of the Hudson piers, it’s called the Intrepid Air Sea and Space Museum because part of it is ON The Intrepid. It was easy to get to in one of the iconic yellow taxi’s which Rian insisted we had to flag down everywhere we went. You can actually board the Intrepid aircraft carrier and explore inside seeing how sailors lived and where all the navigation and steering happened.

The top of the ship was probably Rian’s favourite bit because it housed various fighter planes – he already knew some of them, including the iconic Blackbird which he delighted in telling me about. Apparently it’s still the fastest plane ever flown and was a spy plane too!

As well as the ship (did you know the difference between a ship and a boat? They’re all boats but ships carry other boats on them whereas boats can’t carry ships) you can also go on a tour of Concorde! I didn’t see how a tour of a tiny plane could take an hour so I told Rian he was too little for it (which he actually was to be fair) and he was perfectly happy to admire it from the outside. We also got to look at the Space Shuttle, which was pretty cool. 

The most interesting part for me was getting to look round The Growler (don’t laugh, it was really called that) which is a decommissioned nuclear submarine. How people could live on that, under the sea, thinking at any moment you might be called to surface to rain death on thousands is well beyond me. I was freaked out walking around it when it was docked at the surface! It was a really cool experience though – if you’re in New York I’d recommend visiting the Intrepid Air Sea and Space Museum just for that!

It didn’t take us long to get around the Museum because Rian isn’t at an age where he wants all to look at everything in detail – he’s still in headless chicken mode half the time. We spent the morning there and then we headed further down the river to pier51, where there was a lovely little splash park where I got to relax in the sunshine and read a book and Rian played and had a lovely time. Perfect!

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