Well-known as a fan of zoos and museums, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has taken his hobby to a new level: A campout out in New York’s American Museum of Natural History.
It happened Valentine’s Day and while he tweeted out a photo of him and wife Callista, Gingrich is just now dishing the details of once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Turns out it was a Christmas gift from his wife, who also included two L.L. Bean sleeping bags they slept in under the museum’s 94-foot-long blue whale.
“How could anyone resist?” said Gingrich of the overnight offered by the museum three times a year. “Next to my Valentine,” he said, “it doesn’t get much better.”
In an email to friends he said that he was “thrilled because the American Museum is one of my favorite places. It is the greatest natural history museum in the world because of both the scale of its collection and its pioneering exhibits. I began reading about its early dinosaur expeditions when I was a child. The Africa collection from the 1920s was historic and can still be seen. The Pacific bird expeditions of the 1930s provided important information about Japanese-held islands.”
The museum offers sleepovers about three times a year and Gingrich immediately became a cheerleader for the events.
“About 200 fellow museum-lovers were spending Friday night together. It was a diverse and fun crowd. Just imagine the kind of people eager to spend a night at the museum and you can see it would be a smart, eclectic group filled with curiosity,” he said.
In an email to Secrets, he added, “By the time we finished the brilliant planetarium show on dark matter at 12:45 a.m. we were ready to sleep. Our cots were next to a display of a sperm whale grabbing a giant squid 3,000 feet down. Across from us were polar bear and walrus exhibits. Above us was the 94-foot blue whale. It was a great evening.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
