Cincinnati Museum Center

I am off work today, and Lisa had a couple of tours and then museum work with one of the advisers in the afternoon, so the girls and I took off for a final visit to the Cincinnati Museum Center. I call it a final visit because our membership there expires on June 30, and I don't see us going again between now and Monday.

To be honest, the girls are getting a little old for much of the museum center. The Museum Center basically can be broken down into six separate areas:

1. The Rotunda, which is the main lobby and includes places where you buy tickets, eat lunch, and visit gift shops
2. The Children's Museum, which used to be my girls' favorite place to go and where we spent almost all of our time, but it's really for kids ages 1 to 6 or so. Today we didn't even visit there.
3. The Natural History Museum, which is really nice. My favorite part of it is the replica of a limestone cave. It's really a very involved exhibit. If you've never been imagine the largest possible exhibit of a cave you can imagine and then double it and you MIGHT get an idea of the size of the cave exhibit at the Cincy Natural History Museum. It really is impressive, and you really feel like you're inside a cave.
4. The Cincinnati History Museum. If you've been to the Kentucky History Museum, it's pretty much the same thing. The Cincy Museum is maybe 1.5 times the size of the Kentucky History Museum.
5. Special Exhibits Hall. The special exhibits in this hall usually cost extra money, even for members, so we usually don't go. The current exhibit has a bunch of plasticized bodies in it.
6. The Omnimax Theater. Again, this costs extra money, so we only occasionally go.

Today, as I said, we skipped the Children's Museum entirely. We began at the Natural History Museum. The photo at the top of this entry shows the girls playing with a miniature glacier. In the exhibit they stack sand around the flowing glacier and then watch as the glacier cuts a valley through the sand.

We spent a great deal of time today in the Cincinnati History Museum, a place that we have rarely visited in the past since the girls were too young for it. But they really enjoyed it this time. We spent a great deal of time looking at the miniature version of Cincinnati in the 1920's.

We also visited the special World War II exhibit, which focuses on Cincinnati's role during World War II. Saw this period gasoline sign in the 1940's garage. Wow, that was a long time ago!

My favorite section of the museum, though (and I think the girls like it, too), is the life sized rendition of downtown Cincinnati in the mid 1800's. After winding through some claustrophobic exhibits, a museum visitor comes out into the wide open, cobble stone street with buildings all around. You can go into some of the buildings (Others are just artificial fronts) and see the period relics inside, such as in the corner store and the dress shop and the printing press and the bank. It's all very interesting.

The one thing I DIDN'T like about this section was that there were a whole bunch of volunteers in the exhibit dressed up in period costumes and acting as if they were from the 1860's. I don't mind people dressing up in costumes; that's great. But I don't like it when people want to talk to me like today is 1864 and when they won't give a straight answer to simple questions like, "Where's the bathroom?" When I ask a volunteer that question, I want to be told where the bathroom is! I don't want a reply of, "Ah, whatever you do, I'd avoid relieving yourself in the river there. The town constable has been coming down mighty hard on people who do that of late!"

Anyway, despite the annoying wannabe actors, we enjoyed that part of the exhibit. This photo is taken from inside the life sized steamboat at one end of the exhibit. The girls are on the outer deck of the riverboat, staring at the painting (except I think Meredith is actually staring at the REAL water than runs around the recreation. The real water was about three inches deep).