Interesting Place

The Museum of Science and Industry is in Chicago. I have been there many times. My maternal grandparents live in southwestern Michigan, so we often stop in Chicago for a day or two on our way there. My brother's and my favorite place to visit is the MSI. The museum is enormous. It was originally built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Our favorite exhibit is the Swiss Jolly Ball. It is a classic pinball game. I've spent hours watching the ball traverse the path from top to bottom and side to side. The cafeteria is nearby and there are tables where we can sit and eat our lunch while we watch the Jolly Ball. I am very fortunate that we have parents who will let us watch an exhibit for a long time and not see everything instead of rushing through to make sure we see it all. There are so many things to see we have never seen everything in one trip, but I do have my favorites that I like to see every time we go.

My love affair with trains began when I was a little boy. We have taken Amtrak to my grandparents and even to Washington, D. C. The MSI has a huge display of all sorts of trains, and there is even a model train that starts in Chicago with all of its downtown buildings and goes across the country to Seattle and the Pacific Ocean. There are all sorts of buttons to push. You can load molten iron ore into train cars, chop down trees in the Pacific Northwest, and move shipping containers from boats to train cars. Above the trains is a whole United 727 that we can walk through.

There is a submarine, the U505 which is the only German submarine in the United States captured in World War II. It used to be outside, and I could see it as we walked down a hallway with windows. Now it is inside to better preserve it and you can either walk around the outside of it and read all sorts of facts about it and submarines in World War II, or you can buy tickets to go inside. We've only gone inside once; interesting, but very tight quarters. The most important item the United States got from the submarine was an Enigma, the machine that the Germans sent their coded messages with, and the books with the codes in them.

Another favorite area of mine is the Henry Crown Space Center. They have the Apollo 8 capsule, a mock-up of the Lunar Lander from Apollo 11, and lots of different space suits throughout the years. There is even a model of the space shuttle you can go in to learn about how it works. I know this was one of the museums trying to get a space shuttle, but they didn't win; I wish they would have. That would have been so cool.

There is a farm area too. They brought in a John Deere tractor and combine. There is a movie in front of the combine, and you can wait in line to “drive” the combine through the field and harvest corn. You can even buy a container of corn to take home and grow. We bought the corn once, but I never planted it.

Have you ever seen a baby chicken hatch? There is an area about genetics, and they have a special kind of chicken that you can watch the eggs hatch and see the baby chicks. It takes those chicks forever to come out of the egg. There are even have live cloned mice to look at.

There is an entire coal mine in the museum. The line is often long for it, so we've only gone in it once. It's also dark in some areas, so my brother doesn't like it. This exhibit is so old that my Grandma went through it when she came here on a school trip from Ohio. It's fun to get in the little coal mine cars and ride through the mine. I knew then that I would not want to be a coal miner, but I have a cousin whose grandpa and uncle were coal miners.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is more to see than can be seen on any one trip. At this time of the year, there is Christmas Around the World with lots of Christmas trees in the museum, each one representing Christmas traditions of a country. There is the Pioneer Zephyr, the Silver Streak train that ran from Chicago to Denver in 1934. There is an old fashioned circus train that someone made by hand. One of my favorite areas I can't go in anymore because I'm too old. It was a hands on area with lots of water activities, building projects, lots of exhibits to keep my brother and I busy and occupied. I wonder if I will ever see everything that the museum has to offer? It will probably only happen if I live in Chicago.