While it’s true I am easily amused, I have two candidates.
Museum of Cedar Point. Cedar Point is an amusement park outside Cleveland. The museum contains old park maps, historical photos of the resort, and best of all, builder’s miniatures of the rollercoasters. I could stare at those things all day!
The Gerald Ford Presidential Museum. I know what you are saying. How can it be that the GFPM is interesting, when its subject was easily the most boring person in American history? The answer: that’s where they stow all the Watergate memorabilia! They had not only the actual lockpicking set, but the actual Watergate door that was lockpicked! Now don’t me wrong, Betty’s china pattern was hella boring. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.
No matter the museum, I can usually find something to capture my interest and imagination. A couple that caught me by surprise:
The Range Riders Museum in Miles City, Mo. is really cool. I really felt a sense of the place after spending a couple of hours there.
Not all that far away for the dedicated road tripper is The Museum of The Fur Trade, with a really nice collection of firearms and Native American artifacts.
I haven’t been to all the major ones I’ve wanted, but saw a really cool aeronautical museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil. They had a freakin’ ZERO in there!
I was with a Canadian girl at the time, and she made me practically run thru the damn thing! I shoulda punched her in the throat. How soon will I get that chance again?
I also went to some kind of medical oddities museum in Washington DC many years ago which I can’t remember the name of (I think it might have some association with Walter Reed), but which had some pretty cool stuff like the bullet that killed Lincoln (along with skull fragments and a bloody shirt), a mummified head, a skull from the Civil War with a bullet in it, weird stuff that people had swallowed (I remember a giant hairball). I had heard a rumor that Napoleon’s cock was there too, but that turned out to be bullshit. Still a really cool place, though.
The Witch Museum in Salem, Mass., is strangely compelling for such a cheesy experience. They herd you into a dark room, and tell you the story of the Salem witch trials while lighting up dioramas one by one to illustrate the story. Exit through the gift shop.
The Peabody Museum down the block, though, is genuinely cool. It’s all whaling-related - either stuff that the whalers brought back from their voyages, or equipment that they used to catch the whales. I have spent hours there happily.
The Museum of Communism in Prague. I thought it would be boring as hell (communism , woohoo), but it’s fascinating. Plus they have fun witty postcards. Check out the e-cards in the links for examples.
As I said in the other Museum thread, The Hammer Museum in Haines, AK, USA. I didn’t expect much - and I was really, really interested in hammers by the time I was done.
Moonshine Museum in Gore, NZ was more interesting than I thought it was going to be.
The next time you meet her, presumably - unless you’re prepared to accept punching someone else in the throat as an alternative - perhaps not even a Canadian, or a girl.
This isn’t really true, and I don’t think it ever was. In fact, since the museum got a face lift a few years ago, greatly expanded, and changed its name to The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), it’s gotten even further away from the whaling stuff. Salem used to be a major trading port with Asia, on a par with Boston, until ships got too big to deal with Salem’s relatively shallow harbor, and a huge parrt of the museum is associated with trade objects from China, Japan, Polynesia, and India. They also have hefty sections devoted to the art from these places. They’ve imported an entire Chinese House and set it up in the museum, and they’ve modernized and enlarged the Children’s section. In fact, you now have to hunt a bit to even gind the whaling stuff.
The Witch Museum that sits on the Salem Common (inside an old church, and with a bronze statue of first settler Roger Conant outside, that all the tourists mistake for a witch) IS pretty good, although they make some historical errors in their presentation. They do have a section on the history of witchcraft that;'s been approved (blessed?) by the Wiccan types, and there’s a lot of superb documentation in their gift shop if you want to get the straight historical scoop (although they no longer sell Chadwick Hansen’s book). It’s probably the best of the half dozen or so Witch museums in Salem.
Inexplicably fascinating is not the right word–but surprisingly fascinating, or museums you would probably not have ventured into on your own but really enjoyed anyway, . . .
The Museum of the Diaspora in Israel–which attempts to showcase what happened to the Jewish people after they were expelled from Israel 2,500 year ago to the present.
And the Museum of Clandestine Immigration and Naval History–also in Israel, but focusing on the years between the end of World War II and the establishment of Israel as an independent nation, and then of course it’s naval history since then.
And an entirely unrelated museum–the Kentucky History Museum. The history of the state of Kentucky, plus lots of opportunities to learn about present day celebrities from Kentucky. We went in as a good use of a rainy day, and found the slightly moving animals to be suprisingly compelling–and the rest of the displays more informative than we’d expected.