As we were on the ground floor and we still had a couple hours to spend before it was our turn for the Star Wars glee, we wandered around that floor for awhile.
The Colleen Moore Fairy House is the finest doll house perhaps in the history of everything. It’s a highly detailed castle that’s about as big as a person, certainly as big as a child that might have played with it. Sections are cut away to reveal the decorated interior. It was much more interesting than I expected. With that said, I wasn’t quite sure how it fit into the museum. It wasn’t scientific and hadn’t been mass produced so I’m not sure where the industry might have been for it. There was an entry room with information regarding the house so I suppose I missed it there.
We briefly passed through ‘Yesterday’s Firefighters’ which had old fire engines in it. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to look at as the room was under construction.
Next door was a large room with all sorts of exhibits about energy. Lots of buttons to push, things to spin and levers to fiddle with to be found here. Can’t say I learned much of anything but it was a fun room to play in. The children seemed to agree.
We then gravitated to a room with a pair of covered wagons in it. Interesting and the comic style artwork on the walls was nice but that’s all the room had in it.
As mentioned there was a Circus room. It was rubbish. The entryway held the worse big cat sculptures I’ve yet seen. The model circus was okay but what was the point of it? How does it fit into the concept of the museum? It didn’t. Oh, there were some fun house mirrors along the one wall in a failing attempt to add a little education to the room but it didn’t work. There was also a video screen near them that functioned similarly to a display I’ve seen in the mall. The one in the mall works better.
We also visited the ‘Eye Spy’ exhibit which felt like less of an exhibit and more of a hallway with windows. I understand that really that’s all most museum exhibits are but most of them tend to hide this better than ‘Eye Spy’ did. There was more foot traffic flowing through the exhibit than stopping in it so maybe that’s why it seemed more like a hallway than anything else? The window displays were evidently meant to be little puzzlers and be politely clever. The hallway was too crowded to really examine them. Half of the exhibit was missing anyway, removed for reasons not provided in the display.
We abandoned this section to head for a section I vaguely remembered from my youth that read ‘Racing Cars’ on the map. We passed through ‘Ships Through the Ages’ to get there. This was mostly models of ships in cases, very nice, and a mock ship’s deck which we had to climb onto. While we didn’t linger, this was on of the nicer rooms we’d been in since lunch and it was relaxing in that regard. The design of the room was pleasant, the room was clean, the exhibit was intact and it didn’t take effort to understand how it fit into the motif of the museum.
The Racing Cars were a bit of a disappointment again. Behind the glass, some were wrapped in plastic. Many were very dusty; inches thick dust. By this time I’d started to wonder if the museum had experienced a water leak but the rooms we were in that were ‘incomplete’ were spread out enough that this seemed unlikely. It’s possible that they were just remodeling a number of things at once but, you know, it really didn’t look good.
Growing slightly annoyed with all this, we headed back upstairs and then visited the balcony where we could walk through one of the planes hanging from the ceiling. The balcony ended up being less busy than anywhere else we’d been in awhile so we could let Kara run around a little, hopefully to burn off some energy. It kinda worked.
Finally, it was almost ‘that’ time. We headed back downstairs, some of us visited the bathroom one more time and we were in line. ‘Star Wars’ here we come!
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