19 January 2008

The Adventure Concludes... Where Faquowe?

Immediately upon exiting the underground parking structure we were faced with a decision: Should we turn right and go back the way we came or go left? The highway sign pointing to the left indicated that highway 90 was that way and that was the first number on our directions. George chose left.

Later on, this moment would be referred to as mistake number one.

We drove through some unattractive city streets and George immediately began second guessing his decision. We were still seeing 90 signs and considered this a good thing. A few blocks later we were directed onto the skyway for 90. There were no direction options at this point; we could either get on the skyway or not. We did.

Turned around as I was, I wasn’t sure which direction we were now headed in. It didn’t feel right but I put it down to the tollway structure that I’d long found confusing in Illinois. We soon paid the $3 skyway toll (robbery!) and were off.

It didn’t take long before we passed a sign that read ‘Welcome to Indiana’. Wha?

Evidently Indiana has a tollway as well as we were soon encouraged to pay fifty cents for the privilege of using their roads. At that booth we double checked our math. ‘This may be a dumb question but is this Indiana?’ It was. We were heading East instead of West. Easily fixed, we’d just turn around at the next exit and head back.

One of the problems that I have with the Illinois tollway is that it doesn’t like to have ‘matching’ ramps. By that I mean that the ratio between entrance and exit ramps is not 1:1. Through most of Wisconsin it is a 1:1 ratio so you know that, if you exit the freeway, you can easily get back on it, even in the opposite direction if you like. Illinois is not like that. Neither is the chunk of Indiana that we got to see. All exit ramps but no on ramps to be seen. We kept driving.

George was now noticeably uncomfortable. Part of this was us being turned around but most of it was because Amy was now very late for her fun. We’d stayed at the museum longer than expected and now we were lost in Indiana. Amy should already be there relaxing!

After another aborted attempt to exit the highway, George pulled onto the shoulder, eyeing a gap in the barrier between the Eastbound and Westbound lanes. ‘What are you going to do?’ Amy asked, concern in her voice. I knew that tone, polite as it was delivered. It is not an actual request for information. Amy knew exactly what he planned to do, as I did. That tone is meant to question the action that everybody knows is to be taken.

‘Let’s not question it,’ I noted as George grumbled a ‘Nevermind’. ‘The worst thing that can happen is that we get caught and, at this point, I’ll help pay the ticket.’ One illegal U-turn later and we were finally Westbound and down. Of course, that also meant we had to pay the tolls again so our getting turned around cost us $7 in funds and about a half-hour of time.

The boys were distracted with the movie playing through the DVD player and the toys they’d gotten in the gift shop. They expressed their concerns briefly over the situation but left us alone when we said everything would be okay. Kara had fallen asleep before we’d even made the skyway, a fact made known to us after George had quoted Simpsons with a loud ‘So long stink town!’ as we got on the skyway and gotten yelled at for it. Kara had been far over tired and needed the sleep. Good for her.

90 took us through Downtown Chicago and the idiots that drive there. George grumbled at many of them and I joined his quiet chorus. Halfway through downtown, Kara awoke screaming, evidently from a bad dream. She refused to be calmed down but did stop screaming. Eventually. She would cry for a half-hour before she completely calmed down. George’s visible tension grew.

By the time she relaxed, we’d already followed the split of the highway to continue on 90. We could have still taken 94 and headed directly home but George was still expecting to deliver Amy to her fun. With Kara now out of sorts, Amy no longer had an interest in leaving us, considering it abandoning her daughter. We reasoned that (1), we’d already made the split and (2) we had lots of time yet before we reached that area. Kara should be asleep again by that time and we could make a final decision then. I don’t believe Amy had any intention of taking the opportunity if it did present itself but, since we were already on that road, there was no point in arguing.

90 was taking us to Rockford, a city that I’m unfortunately familiar with to a slight degree. I find it an unpleasant place but it was a familiar landmark. Of course, our directions had us intersecting with a highway 23 before we’d reach Rockford. The problem was that we didn’t know when that would happen. So onward we drove.

Another thing I dislike about the Illinesian tollway is the lack of quality signage. If you are on a major highway in Wisconsin, you get regular updates as to where you are and what’s near you. For instance, if you are on 94 heading west to Madison, every few miles will be a sign with an update listing the next couple exits, the distance to them and the distance remaining to Madison. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment and progress. You know you’re on the right road. Beyond knowing this was 90 to Rockford, we knew nothing. There were no ‘Rockford – so many miles left’ signs to give us a hint. There would be ‘highway whatever – 5 miles’ hints but that was the extent of it. On we drove.

Two issues started to present themselves. The van was getting low on gas. Not impossibly low on gas, not ‘about to run out’ low on gas, just ‘getting uncomfortable’ low on gas. It was also well after 19:00 and the children politely began to ask when dinner would be. Not clear on how far we had to drive before we reached the junction for 23, we tried to delay dinner until we were back in Wisconsin, or at least on 23. A number of the exits we passed weren’t promising on ramps to reenter the tollway anyway. On we drove.

We reached the junction to 20 and decided enough was enough. It was closing in on 20:00, we needed a break and food. George took the dare and pulled off the tollway. Thankfully, a gas station and a McDonalds were less than a block away, sitting right next to each other. I’m not a fan of McDonalds but, as I was suddenly very hungry, I decided to not care.

While George added gas to the tank, I visited the bathroom. Before I could leave, George met me at the door, noting it would be wise to check on our current location. Duh. We asked the very nice lady for some information in that regard and she was only too helpful, pointing at a map of Illinois to note where we were and where 23 was in relation. According to her, it was about ten minutes down the road. We discussed a few other routes to Wisconsin but all were back roads and that way led to truly being lost. We fueled up at the McDonalds and were off again.

Knowing we didn’t have far to go, George and I kept our eyes peeled for the sign to 23 but it was not forthcoming. We had to stop at yet another tollbooth which noted there was one more tollbooth between us at the state line. This seemed ominous to me. Amy began to question where 23 was but it had to be ahead of us yet as we’d seen no signs. Still, something didn’t feel right. On we drove.

We came to a city and passed through it. Something triggered in my head and I began scanning for landmarks. ‘I know where we are,’ I noted. ‘This is Rockford. I think we missed it.’ George argued against this; we’d both been searching and seen nothing for 23 so we couldn’t have missed it. Somehow, I knew we had. In fifteen minutes we’d be at the last tollbooth and about ten minutes after that we’d finally be back in Wisconsin.

And I was right.

I cheered gently as we returned to the ‘Motherland’ at 20:30ish. George quickly hopped onto 41 which would take us past Delavan and Lake Geneva. ‘How much longer until home?’ asked the boys. When I noted we had about an hour left, George grunted and muttered an expression that indicated he would be taking action to reduce that time significantly.

That’s when the fog rolled in. Deep thick heavy fog that forced George to slow down. A lesser man may have been forced to tears. George grumbled further and kept driving.

At this point, George was ever more focused on delivering Amy to her fun night out. Amy had been texting her friends, updating them with our situation, and had already told them not to expect her. George is not the sort to give up on a quest, especially when he feels like it owes someone but Kara was still awake. When asked if she’d be upset if mommy left, she replied in the affirmative. Grudgingly, George kept on driving.

We made it back to Compound 1.5 at 21:30. The ride had been three and a half hours, not really longer than the ride down to Chicago that morning when you think of it, but it felt longer. We stopped for longer periods of time on the way down so it didn’t feel like we were just in the van like we did on the way back.

It should be noted that Kara was still not tired. I made the mistake of stretching out on the floor and she starting climbing onto my chest and jumping off, landing far too close to my head for my own comfort. She giggled the whole time. She’s like that.

Anyway, the adventure was finally over, thirteen and a half hours after it began.

18 January 2008

The Adventure Continues... Jump to Lightspeed

After a bit of investigating we found out that the ride lasted six minutes and that the area could hold seven people at a time. Seeing the length of the line in front of us, it didn’t seem that this would take all that long.

Ah, but just because they could fit seven people in there, it didn’t mean that every group ahead of us was made up of seven people. Afterall, we were only six. Once again, we were waiting in line.

It was late, we had been at the museum for hours now and the children’s ability to wait was now extremely curtailed. While they did their best not to complain, they were honest about not really wanting to be in line. They wanted to do the Ride; they just didn’t want to line up for it. Kara kept wandering around outside the line and, eventually, we stopped fighting her over this so long as she stayed near us.

Finally we were next. We entered the ride at 17:28. The museum was scheduled to close two minutes later. Overtime!

Again, I’m not a Star Wars fan, but I had been looking forward to being ‘on’ the spaceship. The cockpit of the Falcon did not disappoint in this regard. We were encouraged to flip any and all the switches we could find, bar one that would shut the ride off. George and Jason took one front row seat and Niko and myself crammed into the other. Amy and Kara sat behind us but just to the side so they too could see. The little room darkened as we fiddled with the switches and, suddenly, the ‘windscreen’ in front of us lit up. We were in space!

X-Wings and Tie Fighters flew past us in a dog fight!

It was a beautiful thing.

Rather quickly they started whipping the education on us again. Anthony Daniels came over the ship’s com system (identifying himself as the voice of C3PO and then doing the voice, Niko did not react to this moment of ‘reality’) and took us to lightspeed to our real universe. In the Falcon, we flew past Earth and our Moon, visited the reaches of the solar system, observed the radiosphere and saw what the edge of the universe might look like before returning, again via lightspeed, to the Star Wars universe and X-Wings. The situation was totally immersive, not unlike the reaction my brain has to an IMAX movie but on a much smaller scale.

As we exited the ride we expressed our glee for it. There was no question that it had been worth the wait. George felt ten again.

The lights were being turned off. The museum was closing. Finally it was time to go. By the time we collected our coats, visited the bathroom one last time and I paid for the parking it was 17:47. We had been at the museum for seven hours. No wonder we were all so tired!

Still, George is an expert driver and we had directions that would take us more directly to the Delavan/Lake Geneva area that Amy was headed for so this wouldn’t take long.

Right?

17 January 2008

The Adventure Continues... Spinning Our Wheels

As we passed through the ‘Yesterday’s Main Street’ exhibit earlier in the day, we saw the ice cream parlour within. Now became the time to visit it. I got a sundae that turned out to be larger than I expected. I’ve grown a bit lactoic intolerant as I’ve gotten older so this was not the wisest choice I could have made.

(It’s also possible that after the ice cream is when we visited the balcony but I don’t think so. My memory is fuzzy on this set of events for some reason. Normally it’s just fuzzy.)

We returned to the main rotunda with far too much time yet to spare. While George started hunting for the Christmas tree decorated for Greece, Kara decided it was time to play with me. We directed each other into a National Geographic exhibit just down the hall. After meddling in there for a few minutes, it occurred to me that the rest of the gang had yet to follow us. Before my concern could turn into something more, in they came.

Either due to the placement of this exhibit (just off the main aisles) or due to the increasing lateness of the hour, this exhibit was pretty empty. This gave us a chance to relax and play a bit. Once Kara was distracted with map related blocks, George started watching her again, mostly so he could sit down. I tagged over to Jason and we caused some trouble.

There was a display set up like a meteorological map with a camera pointed at it and everything. Perhaps proving that the lad believes in climate change, he found every hurricane symbol in the set and spread them across the US. Then again, he could be into whole-sale destruction as well.

There was a raft that you could fit half a dozen kids on that you were supposed to point towards the North Star. Or, if you pulled on the rudder fast enough, it would slam back and forth on its moorings. This was more entertaining to Jason thereby feeding into my ‘destruction’ theory of before. We visited a nearby tropical jungle tent where he grabbed all the toy food he could, especially the soda. I quickly grabbed a fruit medley and was happy with that. We built a pyramid out of foam and then he climbed it. There was a cutaway of a plane cockpit and we joined up with the others as we played with that. Again, no real learning on my part but it was relaxing after everything else.

Finally it was closing in on 17:00 and we returned to the transportation exhibit and the Falcon ride. We were only five minutes early (or so) but they wouldn’t let us enter the line until 17:00. This led to me following Kara into the back parts of the exhibit, watching her climb onto a cable car and trying to keep her from escaping the building through the massive doors on this side of the building. I succeeded in this at least.

Then it was 17:00 and we could get in line. It wasn’t a long line so this should go pretty quickly, right?

15 January 2008

The Adventure Continues... In a Galaxy far, far away...

After some more waiting in line, our tickets were checked and we were waved inside. The first item of business was a picture taken in front of a Star Wars backdrop. This was an official type museum picture as opposed to a ‘pause with the digital camera’ type picture. George was handed a ticket to identify which picture was ours and we were off.

It was cool.

While the exhibit did bother to try to make things educational, such as comparing the ‘science’ of a landspeeder to the science of a hovercraft, it was too much fun to be bogged down by the educational experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that to decry the educational experience in general as the whole concept of this museum is to distract you with the entertainment while you learn something. I’m all for that. There are just certain circumstances where the educational part of the process can feel very deliberately grafted on and this one walked that line on a lot of occasions. It was also the exhibit that I could most easily see the educational part of the process ignored the easiest. ‘Do I look at the costumes or read this panel about ‘real’ spaceships? Hello costumes!’

I spent a lot of time with the spaceship models as I like that sort of thing. I even looked at the educational real spaceships part. They were all theoretical designs for future ships. Oddly enough the ‘reel’ spaceships look more real than these did. Give it time.

Next door to this was the droid theatre. In a small stage was a mock-up of the interior of the Jawa Sandcrawler. Referencing that moment early in the original movie, C3PO laments all the trouble his buddy R2D2 gets him into. The ‘story’ then breaks away to a discussion between the slightly animatronic droid on stage and a video screen just off of it with a real robot designer. They go back and forth, we get introduced to the other real robots on stage (despite the fact that these are probably animatronic versions of the real things as well) and learn how far actual robot designs have gotten. Very interesting. Even if I hadn’t wanted to stay and watch, I had to as Jason wanted to stay and someone needed to stay with him. So I did. We arrived just at the start of the show and stayed the ten minutes or so through the whole thing.

While that happened, the rest of our group pretty much saw the rest of the exhibit! The theatre was the third of four sections of the room. George had taken his pictures and we were about ready to go. I looked at a few costumes, we walked past Vader and exited into the gift shop.

This is also where our pictures had printed out. I thought it odd that they printed all the pictures. Surely a lot of them went to waste as not everyone would want their picture. If memory serves, the package was 3 ‘big’ pictures, 4 wallet sized, a cardboard frame and a key chain for $20. Not a bad deal. It didn’t hurt that the picture turned out looking nice, even with my bald fat self in it. I almost look human! ;)

As it was the second to last day of the exhibit, the merchandise in the gift shop was on sale. George got himself a t-shirt and the children picked out toys. Even after all this, it still wasn’t even 16:00. We had chosen later tickets to the Falcon since we expected to be in there for awhile. Now what would we do?

14 January 2008

The Adventure Continues... Post Lunch Disappointments

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!

13 January 2008

The Adventure Continues... Lunchie Munchies

When the museum was designed, those designers seem to have understood that they would have crowds. The walkways are large and easy to traverse. There is plenty of seating spread out for the Food Court. The Food Court itself… well, there’s a Circus exhibit down the hall that must have been based on the Food Court.

There’s plenty of variety, which is nice, at prices that are not unexpected for a location like this (my sandwich, bag of chips, brownie and juice ran me almost $11) but it’s all about standing in lines again. We scouted the location, found tables at which to sit, George took orders from his family and scurried off to stand in line.

Now, the first problem was that we grabbed two smaller tables next to each other as there were no large tables available. Amy was set to take Kara to the bathroom so I would stay behind with the boys. In order to hold both tables we needed to have someone sitting at both. Since there were three of us, one of us would be ‘alone’. From the way we happened to sit down, Jason took on this duty and immediately wanted to dismiss it. I couldn’t blame him as all he wanted to do was sit with us and not be stranded off to the side. Before I could suggest he just sit at the other table but closer to myself and Niko, there was some yelling and tears. We survived.

Soon enough Amy and Kara were back. Somehow we sort of distracted the children while we waited for George. And waited. And waited. It wasn’t his fault as the place was busy but it felt like he was gone forever. Niko entertained us with Pretzel Wars, naming his miniature pretzel as if they were wrestlers, having them fight and then eating the loser.

George appeared with most of the lunch and went back to get into different lines to wait some more. I dove in with him. I walked around for a moment, found that there was an area in the center of the room with pre-made sandwiches and thought ‘to heck with these lines’. The down side to all this was that I didn’t grab the sandwich I wanted. Somehow I must have picked from the wrong pile. The upside was that I saved George from standing in one line as they had the sandwich Jason wanted available in pre-made form. The sandwich wasn’t bad. Actually, for not being what I wanted, it was quite good. Not sure if it was worth $6 though.

After all the fighting to get lunch, actually eating it was anti-climatic in comparison.