The very next Sunday, with no visitors scheduled, we removed the protective covers, as well as the lids lying loosely on top, took off our shoes, and lay down in the boxes.
Through their site, www.uruguaywinetours.com, visitors can schedule tastings and get help making travel arrangements.
Opening the back of the house to public view has become a fashionable idea since the 2003 opening of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Schaulager museum in Basel, Switzerland, where visitors can schedule private viewings of storage rooms organized by individual artists.
To see inside, visitors must schedule an appointment.
And so some 48,000 people are vowing to converge just south of downtown late Friday afternoon, as the visitors' first scheduled meeting here gets under way.
The fair, which organizers expected to attract 250,000 visitors, was scheduled for 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday on Fifth Avenue from 48th to 57th Street.
I've set the bar so high that on that rare Saturday when no visitors are scheduled or there's a rain delay, my children react with shocked indignation: "It's just going to be us?" they chorus in horror.
Yale University, the Smithsonian and individuals had also expressed interest in the collection, parts of which are on exhibit at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, though most of the material is still being cataloged and will not be on view until a visitors center scheduled for completion in 2010 is ready.
For an extended stay, give your loved one a pocket calendar that shows the days and times visitors are scheduled.
As a result of research by scholars who prepared reports in 2006 for the federal government, the interpretive sign in the service's new $5.2 million visitor center, scheduled to open on Feb. 27, will say only that the design "could be a sankofa symbol" and that "no one knows for sure".
