the museum of science and industry

For our last morning in Chicago we had doughnuts for breakfast.  We then loaded up the Jeep and headed to one of the two major museums we hadn't visited yet in all of our trips to that city - the Museum of Science and Industry. http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/exhome.html

Now, we have been to the Field Museum (natural science) and the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium many times - but the Museum of Science and Industry is miles away from the others, in an ill reputed area of the city. We had just never gotten down there.

What drew us there this time was an exhibit they had devoted to Leonardo da Vinci as an inventor. It just sounded very cool, and since it was Father's Day, we decided to go on the way home (the museum was on the way back to I-90 and the Skyway anyway).

http://www.msichicago.org/temp_exhibit/leonardo/index.html

We actually started out by visiting a special exhibit about frogs. That was pretty cool and we enjoyed it. They had plenty of colorful little poison dart frogs, and those little fellows are like living jewels due to their bright colors.

Right outside of the frog exhibit were some of the coolest model railroads I have ever seen. They started in a replica of downtown Seattle. You then followed the trains over the Rockies (where they picked up loads of raw materials) and the Great Plains (where they picked up loads of wheat) to Chicago, where the raw materials ended up in factories. In Chicago, they showed freight trains, Amtrack trains, Metra commuter trains, and CTA loop trains. It was just awesome, just totally cool!

Then we went into the da Vinci exhibit, and it blew our minds. The man was 500 years ahead of his time when it came to science and engineering. Some of the things he first thought of did not come to be put into regular use until the twentieth century. The best part were all of the models - some you could just look at, but many of them were things you could play with. They even had working catapults!

By the time we forced ourselves out of there the day was half over, and it was time to come home. We hit the road, vowing to come back to that very cool museum - we felt we had only barely scratched the surface of seeing all it had to offer.