I haven’t been there since 2008, but my visit to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (called the Mauer Museum now) in Berlin is likely my most engrossing museum visit. It had no AC on the 100f+ day I visited and some of the exhibits had “placards” that amounted to typed pieces of paper stapled to the wall. Still, the way it was laid out was as thorough an education in the Cold War and the Berlin Wall as one could hope for. I was there sweating and not caring for most of a day. I’m not sure what improvements they have made in the last 15 years but I hope they haven’t screwed it up.
Agree. I love the Cloisters. It not only contains the entire Hunt for the Unicorn tapestry series, it has the Met’s Medieval treasury of valuable items, and a LOT of stained glass. **
This is on my list for the next time we visit London. It was closed when we were there last.
It’s also huge!
Yes, the building and its surroundings are really lovely.
I enjoyed the Postal Museum in London - we took a ride on the Mail Rail, which was a lot of fun and very well presented.
I go to museums to see things that are old not to see things that make me feel old.
I did go to the Checkpoint Charlie Muesum. It was very good. I felt old because the last time I had been in Berlin I went through Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo and I chiseled off a piece of the Wall.
I’ve been to a few. Many I have visited are ho-hum or downright boring. But there are a few I have visited that really made an impression on me (all in the U.S.):
The Henry Ford. Wow. If you’ve never been there, put it on your bucket list.
U.S. Space & Rocket Center. I first visited it when I went to a conference in Huntsville. Standing under a Saturn V launch vehicle was just… incredible. I couldn’t believe how huge it was. I took our son there a few years later.
Oklahoma City National Memorial (along with the National Memorial Museum, which is the indoor part). I was on TDY in OC, had some time to kill, and decided to visit it. I was expecting it to be ho-hum, but it was anything but. A very moving and emotional experience. Definitely stop by there if you’re in OC.
National Museum of the United States Air Force. Best Air Force museum on the planet. And I can see it outside my office window. 
You’ll need a few days to do it justice, though.
There are multiple mentions of the Franklin Institute which was one of my favorites. It does appear a bit dated and some of the exhibits need some work. It does look like they are working to update it piece by piece. The famous giant heart is closed but it will reopen in the fall as part of a new exhibit about the human body.
What I’ve liked over the years were the great traveling exhibits that stop their. I’ve seen exhibits about King Tut, Cleopatra, Pompeii and the Terracotta Warriors. Also fun exhibits about the history of video games and Harry Potter. I periodically check to see what the next exhibit will be.
My wife is a museum nut, so we’ve been to a lot of them, not only in the US but also in Europe. A few standouts:
The Pierce-Arrow Museum in Buffalo, NY.
The Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
The Borghese in Rome, if only for Bernini’s David.
The National Gallery of Art, and the various Smithsonians in WDC.
The Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
The Holocaust Museum in WDC.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.
Just want to come back and reenforce how awesome this one is. I mentioned it above (Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum). And when I lived by it, we had a membership and went 3-4 times a week for about five years, and this was on top of my family having a membership when I was a kid and going all the time as well. Watching old-time baseball games in the summer is especially awesome. Riding old steam engine locomotives, Model Ts, a 100+ year old Herschell-Spillman Carousel, horse-drawn carriages, going into Thomas Edison’s workshop, Wright Brothers bike shop, and dozens more historic buildings that were moved to Dearborn by Henry Ford. This is an absolute must-see for anyone that appreciates American history.
This one hasn’t been mentioned yet:
The Kansas Cosmosphere - an amazing air & space museum in the middle of nowhere, Kansas. Among other things, they apparently have the best collection of Soviet space artifacts outside the former USSR. Also, there’s a Blackbird displayed in their lobby in a very unusual manner - very cool.
A couple more worth mentioning:
The Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. I’m not a huge motorcycle nut, but this was well worth the time I spent there.
The Newseum in DC. I thoroughly enjoyed this one when we were there in 2014, and was quite disappointed when I learned that it closed in 2019.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC. Very moving.
I finally managed to visit it only a few days before it closed, but I only had a very limited time there.
Museums that are gone, and I miss them:
The Computer Museum in Boston. – Its collection was split between the Boston Museum of Science and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA
The Boy Scout Museum – used to be at BSA headquarters in North Brunswick, NJ, cycling distance from my house. They moved headquarters and the museum twice since then. But I’ve seen pictures, and it ain’t the same.
The Holography Museum – used to be on Mercer St. in southern Manhattan, then very briefly at Grand Army Plaza. I understand that an angel stepped in to keep the collection for being split up, and it’s now in the keeping of the MIT Museum, but I don’t think they have any of it on display in their new home. There was also a Holography Museum out at Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, but it never got a lot of publicity.
I loved the Mutter Museum!
The New York Museums already mentioned, which I grew up with. I’d add the Carnegie Library, which has had great exhibits the times I have visited.
Not mentioned: A tech museum in Speyer, Germany. Just a block from the Rhine and where our ship docked on our Rhine cruise. Lots of train locomotives, lots of cars, a replica of the Wright Flyer, a full 747 outside, and an actual Russian space shuttle. An amazing place.
I found the Holocaust Museum in Berlin even better than the one in Washington.
Speaking of Washington, the other Washington, The Museum of Flight outside Seattle is pretty spectacular also. It was our event for a conference in Seattle, and a tech editor I know who has been to tons of events held at various museums said it was the best he’s ever been to. Better than the one in San Diego, up there, maybe better, than the Air and Space Museum.
That’s one of mine as well.
I’m somewhat surprised nobody’s mentioned the British Museum yet. Provenance issues aside, it’s really, really cool.
The US National WWI Museum in Kansas City is a world-class war museum, and so is the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. Highly recommend both, but the WWI museum is more comprehensive and less US-centric.
As far as the absolute sleeper of the thread, the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas (about an hour northwest of Wichita, KS) has to be it. It’s a stellar air and space museum in a little town out among the Kansas farms and local Amish populations. They’ve got the Apollo 13 command module among a whole bunch of other space artifacts, including the best collection of Soviet artifacts outside of Russia.
It’s definitely cool; it’s essentially the rocket-focused counterpart to Space Center Houston, which is more concentrated on the astronauts themselves, since JSC was the crew training hub, and Huntsville was the engineering hub. I kind of feel like the Saturn V in Houston is more accessible though; being just about at ground level, vs. up above you.
The references to technology museums reminded me of another super cool place we visited when we were in Berlin a few years ago:
Lots and lots of stuff to look at and do. Even my wife, not a gamer, enjoyed the sit-down Ms Pac Man table they had at the time.
I have a virtually identical photo taken from the same spot, and many others from the Cosmosphere.
Don’t miss the Beer Can Museum in Northampton, Mass.
One of my favorite museums is the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Absolutely fascinating displays and artifacts.
On the European side I stumbled upon a really quaint museum in Amsterdam last fall called Our Lord in the Attic Museum. A bit of climbing stairs but a really hidden gem if you are in the area.