Last night my family and I stayed overnight at the Field Museum in Chicago. This is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. It is located next to Soldiers Field in Chicago. It is also the home of two of the most famous skeleton in the world. One is the early humanoid Lucy and the other is the world's most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex Sue.
The program lets families and groups camp out, overnight, in the actual exhibits. My family of two adults, our son and our two girls, camped out in the Africa exhibit with the local boyscout pack. The program included a snack at night, activities at stations around the museum, a storytelling time before bed, exploring exhibits by flashlight until twelve thirty A.M., a breakfast and hundreds of overly excitable children.
Overall, it was a wonderful experience. This is good, since it costs over fifty dollars per person. First of all, the museum itself is wonderful. It has a ton of really old exhibits, some dating back to the turn of the century or a little bit before. In 1893 it was formed to house many of the artifacts left behind in Chicago, for various reasons, after the World's Fair. It's building, which is not it's second building, cost over seven million dollars to build (at a time when that meant something) and is named after Marshall Field, who contributed the first million dollars toward its development.
The museum's collection of stuffed and mounted animals if incredible. I know that in this modern age, we don't think much of taxidermy and that many people are really anti-hunting (which, while I am not a hunter, I find foolish). Still, you really need to see these exhibits. You will never get this close to this many real wild animals. It is absolutely awe inspiring to look at a five hundred pound lowland gorilla. They have three man-eating-lions, giraffes and almost any other animal you could name. I have been to zoos and I have watched good nature documentaries, but this was something special and different.
Besides that, their collection of skeletons is incredible! Sure, you are going to want to go to see Lucy and Sue, but there is so much more. There is an entire whale skeleton suspended above your head in one exhibit. There is an Neanderthal skeleton next to a modern human skeleton, so that you can look at the two in comparison. Seriously, you could spend a week just in the skeleton exhibit and not get bored. I know that my children loved it. A favorite of my wife was the skeleton of a giant sloth, mounted on two feet and leaning against a tree truck. Wow, just wow.
The activities were O.K. They had trained workers around to show kids how to do scientific illustrations such. Honestly, I was blowing up our king sized air mattress, manually, while they did those, so I really don't know much about that. I have asthma. I tried two borrowed pumps, since ours went missing, and they did not work. It took me over an hour. There is nothing like being exhausted, laying on your side, trying to keep blowing even though your chest is hurting, and looking up to see ten kids standing around you and one saying "Hey mister, what ya doin'?" Good times.
The bedtime stories were African folk tales. They were entertaining. The story teller was very good. They were told right next to Sue, which was cool. The only problem was that her amplification was not good enough. The main hall reflects sound off of all of those marble columns, the marble floor and the marble ceiling. It is like a giant sound box. When there are a bunch of people around the other parts of the hall talking, it makes it really hard to here the story teller, even with a personal amp. Still, good concept.
The snack at time was chips, apple juice, cereal bars and such. You do need to eat a good dinner before you go. Still, I was not there for dinner. The breakfast had really decent bagels, muffins, cold cereal, orange juice, milk, apples, coffee and tea. It was certainly enough for me. For those used to bacon and eggs at every breakfast, it won't work, but it was a better breakfast than I am used to having. The only problem was that the hot water for the tea was lukewarm. That was a major bummer.
The 3D theater is fun enough. It was great to see a 3D Sue chomping down on another dino. Still, the best experience was taking a guided tour the next day. You have a full one day pass the day after your sleep over. We took a tour with a man named Bill. He did a wonderful job taking us around to every area, including botany, various anthropological exhibits, skeletal displays, mounted animal displays, gems, minerals and what not. It was fun to have someone who really knew about the exhibits talk about them for us. He was especially interesting when we stood in the actual sacrifice chamber of an Egyptian tomb and he went over a bunch of hieroglyphs. He also could answer any and all questions my three little learners could come up with. That tour alone was worth the money.
There was also a high school concert band playing in the main hall, during the daytime, which was cool. It seems that the museum really has tried to bring in the community and to make it visually interesting and appealing to almost everyone. They even had some sports jerseys on a statue and on a pteranodon.
Basically, despite some of the small annoyances, it was a heck of a lot of fun. It is worth the time, the money, the lack of sleep and the noise of three hundred school kids let loose for a night in the museum.
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