couldn’t agree more. So so many incredible works of art I wanted to spend some real time looking at and…you just can’t. You’re pulled along with the crowd. And it’s even worse with a guide, who makes you stay together with them.
That right there would be enough to make me turn around and spend the day somewhere else.
During a family trip my parents once took us to a doll museum, which was of course for my sister’s benefit. Even today, forty years later, I remember how I felt like I was in hell. And that was with free parking!
I once went to a park in Nanjing that had a “museum of famous rocks” (“famous” was probably a bad translation; “unusual” was more like it). It was just a room full of weird-looking rocks. One of them looked kind of like a beaver.
Another dud of a museum was the Original American Kazoo Company museum in Eden, NY. I was on a road trip with some friends and I made them take a detour there. It’s really just a gift shop with a few old-timey kazoo-making machines in it. Not really worth it, although I bought a T-shirt and a kazoo.
I’ve been on a number of tours with forced shopping stops. The silliest was a tour in Beijing that had stops at a snack shop, a jade shop, a Chinese medicine shop, a vase shop, and A SECOND JADE SHOP!
There are many I cannot remember, and probably one of them was the absolute worst.
The most memorably bad one was Chiang Kai-Shek’s house (Shilin Residence) in Taipei. Unless changed in the last decade, it doesn’t just omit mention of Chiang’s one party state rule, and war crimes, but attempts making a positive case for someone close to being in the first rank of history’s villains.
If ever in northern Taiwan, I would nonetheless recommend a visit. Just read some 20th century China and/or Taiwan history first.
Regarding the Meteor Crater Museum…I agree it isn’t all that great (the impact video is kind of neat). But of course the main attraction is the “big hole in the ground” which may not be all that exciting to many but it’s pretty much a must-see for any dedicated Route 66 road-tripper. I’m glad I went back in the early 80s when tickets didn’t cost an arm and a leg and you could walk the rim trail without a guide.
To be fair, Ben Franklin’s house in Philadelphia isn’t all that thrilling either. All of the actual original buildings are gone, there’s just a framework showing where the structures used to be, and there’s a little printing press demonstration in the Franklin Court Printing Office and a museum containing some of his personal items.
Are you sure you weren’t in Innsmouth?
Iä! Iä!
Not where, when.
The Smithsonian Natural History Museum, on Father’s Day weekend. I have an extreme aversion to crowds. It didn’t go well.
The Chicago Museum of Natual History was good enough, but I didn’t think it lived up to the hype, or was any better than the Natural History Museum of L.A. The Art Institute, on the other hand, is truly one of the world’s great museums.
I have to ask - what exactly were you expecting? 
If we are gonna do that, Plymouth Rock wins the thread, hands down.
When I was 10 my Dad took me to a pencil museum.
I think Tony Horwitz best described the rock: “It looked like a fossilized potato”.
Yeah, that’s up there. Oh hey, lock, there’s a rock.
This is my favorite entry so far. The picture says it all.
It was a really great museum. However, the Figure with Meat by Francis Bacon was behind plexiglass and had an unavoidable glare from the window it was next to. I think it was behind plexiglass because it was the painting that the Joker liked in the 1989 Batman, saving it from being spray painted or slashed like the other paintings were in the fictional museum he was in. So they may be afraid that someone would act this out in real life.
Or it could be that there are other paintings that are plexiglassed but I don’t notice because they aren’t also glaring. But that’s not the case with other Bacons at other museums where you can get up really close to them to see the fine detail. And if you can’t get really close to see the fine detail, then you may as well just look at the paintings on the Internet. I think the only other time that plexiglass was a problem was, I believe in the Prado but I could be mistaken, where lots of paintings were behind plexiglass and were free from sunlight, but the ones that were well above eye level forced you to look up at them at an angle if you wanted to be close, which emphasized the glare.
The worst museum I experienced was the Lincoln Museum in downtown Springfield, Illinois. It was more like a Disney theme park with holographs and superficial replicas. Possibly this could be something younger children might enjoy but I was expecting so much more for such a renowned president especially at his birthplace location.
Francis Bacon demanded his paintings be viewed behind glass
(Although Phillip Glass doesn’t care if you listen to his compositions while enjoying bacon)
You must have known it would be.