Where Noise and Crowds are Free

(June 13th, 2022)

Our field trip this week took us to the Clark Planetarium. It is free and full of cool science stuff. And that's all really neat if you can stand the noise and sheer amount of children. Naturally we went at the same time as a school group, or some kind of science camp. All the kids had matching t-shirts and they were everywhere. If we wanted to try some of the interactive stuff, we just knew that at least two kids would come and touch whatever we were looking at while we were taking our turn. It was still fun, but the planetarium will probably not make the cut next year.

Here we are outside. Tyler had some errands up north, so he dropped us off on the way. Anything to save some gas nowadays.

Ivory and Pearl played weatherman. It was great because Pearl's green hoodie was the same color as the background screen so she was usually a floating head and some legs.

They have a scale where you can see what you weigh on other planets. You'd be lighter on most of them. And if you were on an asteroid, you would weight almost nothing. I'm assuming since you would basically be in space with no gravity.

I have no idea what this little display was about, but does it matter? These is a mini Thor's hammer and a tesseract. They are adorable.

The glowy electricity ball is always cool to touch.

We already had tickets to go to one of the movies. We chose the Ocean Odyssey in 3D. The first few minutes were really cool and then I fell asleep for the rest of the 45 minutes. Pearl said she couldn't tell I was asleep because with the glasses on, it looked like I was still watching. Nope. Took me a $7 nap. And it was totally worth it.

We tried out the rovers. Red was out of battery power. Green was stuck in a corner. Ivory finally got Orange to do something. So Pearl and I waited to use Blue. Of course there was a kid in front of us who wasn't doing much, but she was super intent on NOT letting us use it. I asked if we could use it when she was done, which was her signal to use it for another five minutes. But we got our turn eventually and we drove our bot into the circle of light and considered our efforts exemplary.

Dou-ble, dou-ble, toil and trou-ble, fire burn and cauldron bub-ble. Something wicked this way comes.

I was trying to get the planets in a picture but somehow only managed to get part of Jupiter and some aliens.

There was a little play area where kids could crawl around and climb inside a rocket and go down a slide and such. The sign said it was big enough for adults. I don't think these builders have seen your average adult recently. I am child sized and it was hard for me to get around in there. It was a squeeze. But I made it into the rocket (barely) for a selfie. But I definitely do NOT recommend that area for adults.

It's possible that I liked the gift shop more than the exhibits, but maybe that is because there were less kids in there by the time we got to it. We had a lot of fun searching through all the stuff. They really had a ton of things. The stuffed animal collection was hilarious. They had many parts of the body and different viruses in stuffed animal form. Ivory's favorites were the uterus and sperm. 

Daisy found a new appendix.

And Pearl got the flu. 

I probably should have picked up a few brain cells for myself.

I was highly amused to find these guys. It has been a while since my obsession with them. Those were the good ole days.

While I browsed the toys, Ivory was over there being a pill. There was a whole pile of little connectors and Ivory took all the white ones out and connected them. Did I mention that kids are annoying? Even mine sometimes. And she literally looks 12 in this picture.

Then we got the text from Dad and it was time to go. It was an adventure. I can see how it must be fun for kids to go visit with their classes, but I probably won't go again for a long while.