In the season now passing, museums in New York actively pursued people like Ms. Baldwin — potential visitors for whom liquid-cool air might have been a gateway drug to the art.
Route 169, a historic roadway and National Scenic Byway, takes you through more of autumn's colorful riches, passing museums and historic structures along the way.
It didn't matter because the busy Central Station tourist office issued me a 24-hour transit pass, museum entrance and hotel booking at the Residence le Coin, a modest hotel on New Doelen Street owned by the nearby University of Amsterdam.
"At first I thought we should ask the first 12 taxi drivers who passed the museum to put panels together.
Visitors do not encounter the statue unless they pass the museum's south side or come out to admire the sculpture garden.
We passed the museum with the Granma, the leisure boat that in 1956 carried Fidel and Raúl and Che and Camilo Cienfuegos and 78 other Cuban revolutionaries from Mexico to a beach on the island's southeast coast.
As he drove back home, Mr. Jamil said, he passed the museum and saw a scene of chaos and plundering as Iraqis carried off artwork, statues, pottery, artifacts and just about anything else.
Then, Lisa takes bus 22. Having not passed the museum for a long time, she asks the driver if the bus is bus 22.
A few months ago the director of the Panhandle-Plains HistoriCanyonseum in Canyon, Tex., told me in passing how his museum was frequently overrun by visiting Germans, so the curious German obsession with the Wild West — which newly arrived Americans repeatedly discover to predictable eye-rolling from Germans, for whom it's hardly news — was not exactly unknown to me.
The American Museum of Natural History plans to install a plaque today to answer a question often asked by visitors to its Rose Center for Earth and Space: "Where's Pluto?" They're missing Pluto because it has been mentioned only in passing in the museum's exhibits.
