I’m a fiend for museums. Every time I travel for work (which is thankfully alone most of the time), I find museums to go to. When I travel for leisure, I pretty much always find some museum to go to in between whatever else I’m doing, too.
I am particularly fond of contemporary art, and technology museums, closely followed by natural history museums.
My favorite museum of all time is Mass MoCa in North Adams, MA, USA. I go at least twice a year, even though it’s a ~4 hour drive. I used to be a member at $250 a year, which also gave me ROAM reciprocal admission to tons of other museums, but money is tight these days and I had to give that up. There was a time when I was doing enough work travel that the money I saved via all the free admission to ROAM museums I got on the road was actually a net savings over the $250 membership!
Has anyone else been to Mass MoCa? We may have crossed paths!
What is your favorite museum? How often do you go? Are you a member?
I’ve been thinking about museums a bunch since I started planning my Art Basel Miami trip later this year… I’m trying to figure out how to bundle the Kennedy Space Center and Art Basel into one weeklong trip with minimal expense lol.
I’m also a space geek. I’ve never been to Houston, but I had a weeklong work trip to Dallas last year. I was VERY tempted to take my unlimited-mileage rental down to Houston to go to the space center, but I just couldn’t fit it into all the other work stuff I had to do.
That trip was actually one of the very few that I didn’t end up going to a museum. There just wasn’t anything within a reasonable distance that I found interesting.
I have been to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida once, back in college, while I was at a competition for the NASA robotics competition I was part of… And I’ve been itching to go back ever since, on my own terms, without other responsibilities and a competition to attend to. Art Basel is in Miami December, which is a great time to fly into Orlando, it’s super cheap, trying to suck in all the tourists… Then I was thinking of driving down to Miami, and flying back from Miami, but apparently there’s rail service between Orlando/Miami (or very cheap flights), I just need to figure out if it’s reliable enough to risk my itinerary on it haha.
And there are plenty of interesting museums in the middle of nowhere. Right near my work there’s a tiny little museum called the New England Steam and Wireless museum, which hosts a couple dozen historic stationary steam engines (the largest one has a ~20 foot flywheel or something crazy like that), and they almost all work, and they have several running most weekends. It’s really cool because you can get right up close to the working engines (and could definitely be killed if you aren’t careful), so it’s definitely an up-close-and-personal experience. I’d have never known about it without some serendipitous chance, I just drove down a back road one time to look for a place to set up my hammock by the river and read, and I saw the sign. I guess it’s not truly “the middle of nowhere”, but it’s a poorly advertised diamond in the rough.
I’ve been to Houston a few times, and the work usually alternates between Houston and Galveston, so I driving to JSC was no problem.
Another work trip took me to Mobile, Alabama, and it annoys me to no end that I only learned after the trip that I could’ve visited USS Alabama there. Especially since I spend half a week killing time before any work could commence.
I had a work trip to… I think it was the Montgomery area in Alabama.
I ended up going to Harbor Freight and buying a chisel and a hammer, and driving/walking out into the wilderness along a river to a spot I found on some old forum threads to find some fossils… I ended up finding a couple, which was very cool! Just some primitive plant stem fossils, but still interesting enough that I’ve still got them on display in my little rock cabinet. (I did a similar thing in North Carolina at the Crabtree Emerald mine to try and find an emerald, and I sweat my ass off in the sun for 5 hours and found nothing lol)
The guys I was working with also swore up and down that since it was really my first time “in the south” that I’d never had real Barbecue before, and they proceeded to take me to the grossest, sketchiest, gristly-est, worst Barbecue I have ever consumed in my entire life lol.
Not space related, but in Dallas the 5th floor museum (Kennedy/book depository) and Dallas Museum of Art are good.