For boring house museums, there’s the Mayslake Peabody Estate in Oak Brook, IL. The house itself is nice but almost every room is empty. Poor ole Mr Peabody died almost as soon as the house was finished and his wife and children were “to hell with this” and moved to California immediately after. All the custom furniture that was on order from Marshall Field & Co was cancelled so the place is virtually unfurnished. It’s basically a lot of empty rooms with some nice woodworking in the central locations.
Is Graceland considered a museum?
Stopped by there a couple years ago. Was shuffled through a house with horrible and embarrassing decor, and it smelled of mold.
Nevada State Museum in Carson City is located in the impressive old Mint Building. Which has big metal shutters. Which were kept closed. Like 20 foot ceilings with a 40 watt bulb hanging on a bare wire. Couldn’t see SHIT! I was so pissed off.
This kills me! 
Shit, I got 3 dogs!
I don’t know. Some information on the history of the kazoo? An exhibit on kazoos through the ages? More than one room?
My nominee here would be the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen. It’s world-famous, one of the symbols of the city. You’ve seen it in many photographs, and it’s lovely, surrounded by water, and often dramatically lit by sunrise or sunset. So of course you have to go.
The first problem is that it’s way outside the main city center, in an uninteresting part of town. The seaside boardwalk follows the perimeter of a pretty nice park, but otherwise it looks like a former industrial area that they haven’t quite decided yet how to reclaim. The statue itself is small, a few meters off shore, and oriented in a strange way, so the good views of it are limited to a specific part of the boardwalk.
Once you get over your disappointment in the statue, the site does offer one fairly unique tourist attraction: It’s a great place to step back and see two hundred people all looking in one direction with the same expression on their faces: “We hiked all the way out here for that?”
The Manhattan Project National Historical Park in Los Alamos, NM is just a boring collection of empty buildings with no artifacts or much signage even. I feel sorry for any visitors who thought that’s all there is and missed the excellent, but blandly named, Bradbury Science Museum a few blocks away.
Not sure if this would count, but the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.
They are spectacular, and obviously there are many security precautions: real security guards (i.e. police or soldiers, not medievally-garbed Yeoman Warders), and bulletproof glass, and so on. But to get a good look at them close up, you walk around their display case. And you keep walking; if you stop, an alarm sounds, and you’ll be told to keep walking, and you’ll attract the attention of the guards. You can walk around the jewels’ case as much as you like, but if you want to stand and look at the jewels, you have to move to a riser maybe eight feet back. Really, if you want to see the Crown Jewels better than you can see them for real, buy a book in the gift shop.
That’s shouldn’t take away from a visit to the Tower of London, which is fascinating, and I thoroughly enjoyed my visits there. The Yeoman Warders (“Beefeaters”) were all friendly and happy to answer questions and pose for photos—I even got to talk with the one who looked after the Tower’s famous ravens. The Tower of London is a great place to visit, and I’d recommend it for any visitor to London.
But be warned—the Crown Jewels will be a letdown.
Been there, done that.
We were there in 2016 and thought the Museum was excellent. They even had a small film. Dad really wanted to see it so we went and I thought it would be a 15 minute stop at most. We were there for roughly 2 hours. Part of it was just sitting and staring at the Crater.
We went last year, and they’ve changed things up. Now you’re on a little conveyor belt while you’re shuttled past them.
IIRC, you pretty much have to go through the museum to get to the crater. As I recall, the museum had some good info about the formation and history of the crater. But the attraction is the hole in the ground itself, not the museum. And IMO, the hole in the ground is pretty much not to be missed.
Close to the cruise ship terminal there is a more impressive (and sexier) mermaid statue.
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We go to a lot of museums, and they have all been good or great, but the most disappointing was the Museum of the Weird in Austin. It’s kind of like a claustrophobic bargain-bin Ripley’s, mostly there for kitschy amusement (at $13/ticket), and it also has some ethnographically-uncomfortable objects like shrunken heads. I can’t recommend either for or against it, but I don’t see going back.
As for Plymouth Rock as a tourist attraction, like the Little Mermaid mentioned above, be sure to watch the expressions of people seeing it for the first time.
The Liberty Bell ain’t no great shakes either.
Heh, funny joke, but if a zoo does count as a museum I would say a very sad zoo I saw as a kid. I was traveling through Canada with my family, we saw a sign for a zoo along the road, and decided to stop.
You followed a trail through a wooded area and there were animals in small cages along the way. These cages were barely larger than the animals, which all looked miserable. My sister crouched down to look at a porcupine, which brandished its quills and scared the crap out of her. The ‘main attraction’ was a very bored looking lion in a cage the size of a walk-in closet. It was repeatedly roaring, the sound astonishingly loud echoing through the woods.
The conveyor belts in the Jewel House at the Tower of London have been there for over 30 years. As it happens, I have on a couple of occasions been invited to private receptions at the Tower when the guests were able to see the display close-up without being moved on. I’m not sure that you miss much by seeing them from the conveyor belt and/or from slightly further away.
We took a ferry from Portland, Maine to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia when they first restarted service (maybe) 12 years ago. This was supposed to be a huge boost to the economy of that part of Nova Scotia. There were signs everywhere celebrating the resumption of ferry service and welcoming visitors.
However, this feeling seemed to be limited to the municipality. The good people of Yarmouth seemed rather put out by hundreds of people descending on their town. The wiser ones toon the hint and immediately drove off toward Halifax or Cape Breton or wherever. We decided to spend a day in Yarmouth. There was a lighthouse and the area surrounding it was very picturesque, but when looking for other things to do we found a Museum of Firefighting. Our daughter was in prime Firefighter Fan phase at the time, so this sounded good.
The museum seemed to make absolutely no effort to cater to younger visitors. They gave you a tour but the language used in narration was something a fire engine technician might best appreciate. I’m sure it was a record time for our kid to go from “Yay!” to “Get me out of here!”
Reminds me of the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, WA. You buy a loaf of bread with your admission as you drive in and you are immediately surrounded by mangy looking bears striking their most adorable poses hoping you lob a slice of stale bread at them. The finale is a road block set up by a collaboration between an elk and a horse that will extort you for your remaining bread before they let you pass.
You can - or could, the last time I went- go up a couple of steps to view the other side of the case and go round again. Of course they try to keep people moving, there are lots more waiting behind; and as for keeping a distance, there’s not only security to consider - you wouldn’t want to have to keep wiping finger-marks and breath off the case, all day long.
I suspect less than half the people who view the Crown Jewels are convinced that they are looking at the real thing.
BTW, I was at the Louvre on Friday evening and except for the scrum in front of the Mona Lisa, it wasn’t too crowded to enjoy. I also wonder how many people think the Mona Lisa is a fake.
I have a relative who is outraged with the Smithsonian because when she attended the Natural History Museum during the DC Trump Rally, they told her the dinosaur bones on display were replicas. She’s still mad about it. She keeps saying you can’t trust people with PhDs. The last time I mentioned museums she vehemently said, “Fuck the Smithsonian.”
I can’t tell how much she is joking but she seems pretty animated about it anytime anyone mentions museums.