Museum of Ice Cream Details

There's a lot of hype about the Museum of Ice Cream. I'll tell you all about it and let you judge for yourself.

First off, you have to have a ticket to get in - there is no standby line. All 30,000 tickets sold out in a few days, and then they extended it for another two weeks in September and they sold out in a matter of minutes.

Tickets are timestamped. You show up around your time and they put you in a group of 10 people. You move through the museum with this same group of 10 people. This was a brilliant idea because it never got crowded and it keeps the flow moving steadily.

The museum is broken into 7 rooms. You stay with your group and move in order. Once you go into one room you can't go back to the previous room. Since I didn't take many pics (just the YouTube video below), here are gifs from the video. :)

Entry Room

In the entry room, they explain what I just told you and they give you a spoon while you're standing under a ice-cream-sundae-fied deer. Then you stop by the front desk and they give you the ice cream of the week. Ours was Blue Marble from Brooklyn with Froot Loops on top.


Balloon Room (aka Cone Room)

Next up is the helium filled sugar balloon room. They are super cool but only last about 10 seconds before they stop floating. So get your boomerang instagram quick or you'll have to ask for multiples like I did.

They're fine giving you multiples. :)


This room also has a ton of ice cream cones on the wall and all the lights look like upside down cones with ice cream scoop lightbulbs. It's designed for instagram.

Scoop Room

Next we meet a museum employee that tells us three facts about ice cream and then he gives you a scoop. You scoop out some fake ice cream and pile it on a giant fake sundae.


Chocolate Chamber

The chocolate chamber is a dark room with cocoa beans on the floor so it smells like chocolate. A weird fountain on the far side makes you wonder if it were an afterthought. It is definitely not instagram-worthy. Four stands around the room offer up as many dove chocolates as you can fit in your pockets. ;)


Sprinkle Pool

Unquestionably, the highlight of the entire place is the Sprinkle Pool. The sprinkles are made of tiny plastic dots, so it's not messy. Although they get in everything - pockets, your shirt, your underwear. I found sprinkles in my house for a week. It was kind of awesome.

The sprinkle pool is also where you realize that the Museum of Ice Cream has a second purpose (the first being to inspire FOMO on Instagram). It's designed to be a date. In fact, if you read ahead, there's a Tinder Room.

Going without your spouse or significant other is awkward at times. But Josh (who's wife had to work) and I (my wife was out of town) owned it (as you'll see in the Tinder Room).

The pool is supposedly three feet deep, but I could only wiggle my feet down about 18 inches - I never touched the bottom, it just gets difficult to maneuver through that much plastic.

No diving. But burying is accepted. And everyone seems to love getting in on burying somebody. I don't know any of these people!


The icing on the sprinkle pool room cake is a shelf of candies along the wall that you can eat as much of as you'd like. :)

Miracle Berry Room

Sadly, you have to move on to the next room. But they give you ice cream there so it's ok.

As soon as you walk in, they give you a "Miracle Berry." It's a pill that's supposed to trick your tongue into thinking sour things are sweet. Apparently my tongue is too smart to be tricked.


Some people say it works. I am not one of those people.

As you can see behind me in the gif above, this room also has some ice cream art. This is really the extent of the "Museum" part of the Museum of Ice Cream. And, for that matter, the "Ice Cream" part too, except for the first room's sample.

Tinder Room

The final room is the "if-you-didn't-come-with-a-date-the-exit-is-right-in-front-of-you" room.

So sad sitting on an ice cream sandwich swing by yourself, huh? Well, forget that.


And there's a little gift stand off to the side that I didn't really look at. But they give you a free bottle of water on the way out! And that was exciting for me. :)

Check out the video of our experience here, including what we thought about it at the end:

Up Late on the High Line

We were super excited about tonight. The High Line, which we've been on plenty of times before, invited the City to come out and play after dark, in an event they called Up Late on the High Line.

Along with the ability to roam the park after normal closing hours, they invited artists to create various light and sound installations to entertain us. Sounds like an amazing event, right? You can see why we were excited to go. And so was everyone else.

We waddled along and saw a few cool things (check out the video below for the full experience), but around 10:45 it was already too packed and they were asking people to leave. We made it to about the Standard:

So we turned back and took a few long exposures on 14th Street just to kill some time...

And then we wandered along 14th Street to Black Tap for a burger (pretty good, not up to Shake Shack standard or anything, but good) and their famous shakes (again, pretty good, not quite up to the hype, but very photogenic).

Check out the full experience in the video here:


Thanks for reading/watching. :) Have a great day!

Central Park Sunset

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I have a conference call that goes until 6pm. So I usually can't go out and run until it's dark. But today I decided to see if I could take the call from the Park. It turned out to be a great decision.

I was still home when the meeting started. Based on the agenda, my part wasn't until the end. So I walked over to the Park and listened while the other presenters talked. I watched the geese and admired the hazy skyline.

By the time my turn came around, I was on the East side of the reservoir.

It was relatively quiet where I was, until a few helicopters flew overhead. I hadn't planned on that.

The meeting ended just as the sky was starting to glow.

Perfect timing. I ran up the track a little to put the clouds where I wanted them in relation to the El Dorado Towers.

I think I'll do this every week now.

Great Lawn and the Met #EveryPath

I had planned to knock out the entire section from 86th down to 79th, but after the sun set and the wind picked up, I bailed on the west side. I'll get those paths later.


Running every path in an area takes a lot of retracing steps. If you click on that strava map, you can drag your mouse along my pace on the bottom and see my little dot run around and around in circles. I try to make big circles so it's not as obvious, but I think the kids playing basketball figured I was up to something when I ran straight through mid-court.

The first photo-op I ran into today was the Obelisk. Did you know this thing is legit 3465 years old? I read up on it this evening.

I love the part about how they just spent two years cleaning and preserving it and when they removed years of dirt and pollution they found new hieroglyphs they didn't know about before.

Next stop was the Turtle Pond.

Which, you gotta wonder, where do the turtles go when the pond freezes over?

Turning out to the East, you go through this arch...

...and then out to the Met, where you'll see these three bears.

I took a mildly wrong turn and ended up running down the Bridle Path (remember that's "bridle" as in bridle your horse, not "bridal," unless you're referring to your fiancée as a ball and chain). The Bridle Path has to be the only path in the Park that was never plowed.

It was slippery and wet.

Sunset started up and it was iffy whether or not we'd see any colors tonight.

After a cold 30 minutes of waiting, it didn't disappoint.

It was hard for the camera to capture the scope of it, so I tried my phone's panorama.

The lower dark clouds came rolling in, but the upper clouds were still shining bright.

And in one fleeting attempt at a little more color, the lower dark clouds got a touch of pink.

And then I started to freeze so I ran home.

Do You Want to Build a Snowman?

I took an afternoon break to run a quick loop around the loch.


The temperature rose to the mid-40's today and the snow is melting fast. I figured if anywhere still had snow, it'd be the North Woods. Hardly anybody goes up there.

On my way in, this scene caught my eye.

It appears that the person driving the plow thought the path was on the other side of the light posts.

As I suspected, the ice on the ponds and lakes was starting to thaw.

I dropped down through the Glen Span Arch which is basically the start of the Loch. Then I ran alongside the Loch to the end.

The Loch is pretty, with bridges, waterfalls, and small streams coming off it and meandering through the woods.

When I got to the Huddlestone Arch, which marks the end of the Loch next to Lasker Rink (remember Lasker from yesterday?), I turned to take a picture of the waterfall and sunset.

But I felt like it was missing something. Some personality. So I built a mini snowman.

It's my first snowman in years. I think he turned out rather well. :)

I backed up and surveyed the scene again.

Much better. :)

I started to run off, but before I could even get around the corner, another photographer came down to capture Mr. Snowman.

Yay! He likes my work. :)

I ran back up along the other side of the Loch back up to the Pool (it's a pond, but it's called the Pool). Still mostly frozen.

Hope you're having a great day! I sure did. Snowmen put you in a good mood. :)

#EveryPath around the Lake in Central Park

Ok, not every path. Just the path closest to the lake. But it made a cool track.


I took off right after work, so I could watch the sunset on midtown. As you can see from the track, I entered from the top, so the first view of the lake is from above the Oak Bridge.

Then I ran along the Rambles side of the lake, passing the ice ladders that are currently useless (it was almost 60 degrees yesterday, although today was 27 degrees).

I came upon a new boat launch they just constructed.

If you're wondering, the lake is where you can take row boats out (from the Boat House, of course). You paddle around and if you get tired or want to let somebody out, there are boat launches all around the lake. They're in the process of redoing them all and making them really nice.

I crossed the Bow Bridge and looped back around the Boat House and back into the Rambles from the East Side. If you ever want to go trail-running in New York, here's where that's possible.

Sorry for the blur. It was too cold for the nice camera (it has a minimum operating temperature of 32 degrees), and my trusty indestructible Olympus is hurting in low-light conditions. :(

Although it did alright there with the San Remo towers and the Bow Bridge. This is taken from the point of the peninsula in the Lake (if you look at the Strava track, when I come in from East Drive, I go down to a point).

Wrapping around back toward the Bow Bridge, there is a clearing where you get this view:

I stayed as long as I could bare it (it was freezing!) to soak it all in before my flight tomorrow. I'm heading down to the Caribbean for work. See you in one week, Central Park!

#EveryPath in Central Park

I love Central Park. A lot. 

I love to explore it. All of it.

When I moved to the Upper West Side, I started running in Central Park as often as I could. I'd run different paths each day because I wanted to see it all. After a few months, I started to wonder if I'd actually been on every path in the Park. So I looked at different running apps and found a web app that could connect to Strava and overlay multiple runs on a single map.

So after possibly running the entire Park once (which, according to CentralPark.org's faqs, is 58 miles), I started tracking it to see for sure. Here's where I'm at as of tonight.

There are a couple paths currently under construction that I can't access, but whatever.

Now it's 2016, and I'm gonna do it again. Except this time, not only am I going to track my run, I'm going to document them on here. I'm going to post at least one picture from each of my runs through Central Park, along with the route and stats for the run.

I need to make one thing clear: I don't particularly like to run.

I don't care about my times or pace averages. They're often much worse than actual because I stop to take pictures and enjoy my surroundings. This project isn't about running or health or improvement of any kind. I JUST LOVE TO EXPLORE. And I love Central Park. I'm excited to share the Park with you, one path at a time. By the end of 2016, we'll have seen #everypath in Central Park.

And I'm hopeful that this hashtag catches on and people start to share areas they love to explore. #EveryPath in Zion National Park? #EveryPath in Yellowstone? Take the hashtag and run with it (or bike with it - Strava does biking too).

Here's what you need to join in:

• Strava: Android and iPhone
• Map Overlay: http://www.jonathanokeeffe.com/strava/map.php

Yay! See you on my next run.