Travels with Tessie: Museum Piece

Our Thanksgiving trip to Boston continued with a visit to Boston's second-best-loved tourist attraction, the Museum of Science. (Any guesses what #1 is? Answer below.)

So to Cambridge we drove. Yes, it's the Boston Museum of Science, but it straddles the Charles River, and the parking garage is in Cambridge. We found the parking to be quite a bit more crowded than we expected, but the museum itself wasn't too bad.

Luckily, our membership to one of our local science museums has reciprocal benefits here, and we were even able to get Aunt Leslie in. Upon entering, we headed straight for this kinetic sculpture, which Tessie watched with fascination while we figured out what to do next.

Nearby was a gallery devoted to understanding taxonomy. Tessie tried her hand at classifying animal skulls,

sorted various minerals according to her own scheme,

and got to see a tiger (her favorite animal) up close!

We even took Tessie to her first movie. The museum has an Omnimax theater, and was showing some kid-friendly features. We gave her the choice between a film about a tropical reef and one about Antarctica. She chose the one with the penguins. Unfortunately, this particular film was about 15 years older than Tessie, but still she enjoyed the scenes of the penguins frolicking, and the filmmakers spared us from having to see any of them becoming leopard seal lunches. Tessie endured her first move theater experience quite well. She sat without fidgeting, kept her voice down, and behaved properly. Her only complaint was that the soundtrack was too loud, and I have to agree with her on that. She may not be ready for a full-length feature yet, but it's nice to know she can sit still for 40 minutes.

After the film, we went back into the museum galleries. Tessie got to operate a bank of mechanical devices,