I was there between 30 and 40 years ago, and there was no conveyor belt then. I remember pausing slightly a few times, and no one rushed me along. All I remember was a little ring that I really coveted. It was round and domed with tiny rubies in a cross form on a ground of tiny sapphires with a ring of more tiny rubies around the border. So pretty!
Hmmm, one of these? Though I think they’re all diamond-bordered.
I just came back after googling to claim my poor memory! I think the ring I saw was one of the Coronation rings – the one especially made for Victoria because she had such small fingers. It’s funny how memory plays tricks … I could have sworn the rubies and sapphires were much smaller and set pave style. It’s still pretty!
It is!
Pre-COVID, my local museum had an Egyptian exhibit, and they also said that everything except the mummy that was on permanent display were replicas. I personally felt a bit cheated.
I visited The Zoo of The Damned in Brazil. Horrible conditions, tiny cages. I’ll never forget the Black Jaguar they had. Cage was about 4x9 feet. The animal could just barely take one step and turn around. Poor Devil did this constantly, pacing back and forth while emiting the most mournful, pitiful wail I’ve ever heard. Saddest thing I can ever recall seeing. 
Saw a cage with some kind of crazy bird, about the size of a small turkey. It was sitting on a perch, looking really distressed and uncomfortable. Then, Plop! Out drops an egg! How about that??
It dropped off the perch, pecked it open and ate it, right in front of me.
They also had displays of the worst taxidermy ever.
About 15 years ago the Columbus Zoo installed an animatronic dinosaur exhibit (I think they still have it). When it first opened, a few people asked for their money back because the dinosaurs weren’t real.
I’ll vote for World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta.
It’s not necessarily a bad museum, especially if you’re a Coke fan. But the hype-to-satisfaction ratio is pretty abysmal if you’re not an Atlantan who has an inordinate sense of importance about the soft-drink fortune that built a good chunk of the city.
I know out-of-towners who have been taken there as part of the obligatory Atlanta tour, and their reaction is always “why did they take me to a soft-drink museum?” And the answer is that because it’s massively significant locally, locals assume that it’s universally significant to everyone.
Lincoln’s birthplace is in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Which is also disappointing honestly. For years they claimed that the cabin on display was the original one he was born in but it was eventually revealed to be a fake.
The best reason would be to watch their reaction to tasting Beverly Cola (assuming they have tasting samples there like at Epcot). Did you get a chance to do that?
Some natural history museum in Lima that had some of the worst taxidermy you’ll ever see.
I think my worst was the Guggenheim. Not because of the exhibition, but because Frank Lloyd Wright, in an architect’s (the so called “mother of all arts”) flex put the whole thing on a spiral ramp. An elevator pulls you to the top, and you stumble back down while being exposed to art
Abstract Expressionist masterpieces like Rothkos and Pollocks, or expertly-balanced Old Masters like Rembrandt of Goya: the experience of the strength of the painting’s presence is not to be minimized. You don’t just take it in at the eye, like Sister Wendy and her postcard reproductions: it hits you all the way down to your feet. But an incline like the Guggenheim, gravity herding you along like cattle is offensive.
Masterpieces aside, that’s one of the most rewarding features of a visit to a museum, or a gallery or cemetery, even if it’s a small object from hundreds of years ago, saying hello across the centuries. That requires a (somewhat) private, unmolested moment between the object and the viewer.
The thing I didn’t like about the Guggenheim is that the pictures you are about to see broadcast themselves from far away due to the unobstructed view, if they are large and recognizable, so that the sense of mystery about what is coming up next is lost sometimes.
Otherwise I quite like it. I wouldn’t want all museums to look like it, but it is great for a change of pace.
This is Beautiful!
I have petroglyphs in the hills behind my house. I can sit while the dogs do their thing and just stare at them with a beer in my hand and get transported back 6000 years.
We just sold our place in Williams last winter. Missed the Poozeum, and will likely never make the effort to visit. Oh Well.
Is the Bradbury Museum the one that was featured in an episode of Breaking Bad?
I went to TripAdvisor and I see that the review I left for the museum has disappeared, along with a couple of other reviews I have left for Canadian businesses.
I didn’t think TripAdvisor deleted reviews unless they were either fake or reflected some kind of racial or ethnic animus. I am sure that mine did not. I have several hundred reviews on TripAdvisor, so I don’t know if everything else I posted is still there. I wonder if the legal framework in Canada is more amenable to businesses being able to demand that reviews get removed.
If it wasn’t that it was likely the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. I have not been to the atomic museum in decades, well since before it was moved off Kirtland AFB. My memories of both those museums and the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo is that all three always seemed like museums created by intelligent people who were experts in the subject matter, liked going to museums, but didn’t really know how to make a good museum.
The worst I’ve ever been to is the UFO museum in Roswell. The worst I’ve ever been to where I’m sure the people were actually serious about the whole thing (unlike in Roswell) might have been the Tokyo National Museum. Now hear me out. It does all the little things well, just as you might expect from a museum in Japan. There’s easy lockers to store bags and plenty of them, good food, lots of places to sit and look at things, even interactivity with some exhibits. It’s also very Japanese in that they rotate out large parts of the collection seasonally (so not great for a one time tourist), you really have to want to see a lot of swords as part of it, the sections on the history and prehistory of the islands seemed spotty, and frankly I think I’ve seen better collections in both Washington and London. Then there was the limited exhibition about Romance of the Three Kingdoms which cost extra, was well described in both Japanese and Chinese but not really English, and was so packed with aggressive Chinese tourists it was a struggle to actually see anything. I only blame the museum for not having some better sort of crowd control on that one.
The Salem Witch History Museum. I was there 30 years ago, and somehow they’re still open. Reviews are 2.9 out of 5 on Tripadvisor. Our friend group was misled by the word “history” in the attraction’s name, but it was more like a cheap haunted house.
Is that the museum Darrin Steven’s stole the bed warmer from?