To Do: Visit The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

I have long been a great fan (and neighbor!) of the main branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art... its been like a second home to me, and I will truly miss the views from its roof, cocktails and music at the balcony bar, and visiting my Degas ballerinas.

I have always wanted to visit the Met's other branch, The Cloisters:

The Cloisters—described by Germain Bazin, former director of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, as "the crowning achievement of American museology"—is the branch of the Metropolitan Museum devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. Located on four acres overlooking the Hudson River in northern Manhattan's Fort Tryon Park, the building incorporates elements from five medieval French cloisters—quadrangles enclosed by a roofed or vaulted passageway, or arcade—and from other monastic sites in southern France. Three of the cloisters reconstructed at the branch museum feature gardens planted according to horticultural information found in medieval treatises and poetry, garden documents and herbals, and medieval works of art, such as tapestries, stained-glass windows, and column capitals. Approximately five thousand works of art from medieval Europe, dating from about A.D. 800 with particular emphasis on the twelfth through fifteenth century, are exhibited in this unique and sympathetic context.

As soon as the crazy weather straightens itself out (soon? please?) I will hop a bus and get medieval on the Met's ass.