Part Two of my vacation narrative detailed our trip through Amish Country, eating good food and browsing antiques. Today’s final installment covers our exodus from Amish Country and our visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and the Great Lakes Science Center.
We got up on Thurday around 8am again, showered, packed up, and headed down to the front desk to check out. There was already one other person waiting to check out, and we had no idea how long he’d been there, so we joined in the waiting.
Rang the bell. No response.
Finally, the guy who had been there first decided to go find *someone*. He asked someone back in the restaurant area what we should do about turning in our keys, and she pointed out that there was a key drop box by the front doors. Silly us. So, that was ten minutes of our day wasted, but no big deal.
Off to escape Millersburg.
We plotted out our trip from Millersburg to Cleveland, heading out of town on a two-lane highway until we got to I-77 North. It ended up taking us a good hour and a half to reach Cleveland, with Amish buggies and highway construction and just general OMG-we-are-so-far-south.
But we finally made it, and without stopping for breakfast.
We parked at the Science Center parking garage and headed in to get our one-day pass for the Rock Hall, Body Worlds 2 (the current Science Center exhibit), and the Science Center itself. As our main focus of the day was doing the Rock Hall, once we’d bought our passes, we headed over there first.
We’d already done the main floor of the museum when we’d attended the Gravity Games a couple years back, so we just skimmed over that part. Before heading upstairs for more exhibits, though, I required food, so we got some grub at the cafe, which wasn’t bad. We ate outside on the balcony, amongst the birds and the breeze.
And who did we run into there but James, from work, and his wife Christina. Bizarre! They’d been camping in PA, and decided to come back to civilization and stay in a hotel and check out the Rock Hall. They didn’t stay to talk long, as we were still eating lunch. It was cool to run into them, though!
So, we checked out the History of Rock and Roll movie(s), the MTV video exhibit, the Tommy exhibit, and the other rock randomness on the upper floors, all in a couple few hours. Hmm. Off to the Science Center, then.
Scott at work had told me about Body Worlds 2, and said that I just *had* to go and check it out sometime. See, Dr. Gunther von Hagens came up with a process wherein a human body could be “plastinated,” by replacing the water and fatty tissue with polymers. The result is a human corpse that looks a lot like the model of the human body most of us saw in elementary school. But it used to be a real human being.
Creepy, eh?
We looked through the entire exhibit, marveling at the size difference between a man’s bladder vs. a woman’s bladder, and the difference between an obese person vs. a “normal” person, and being generally disturbed by seeing likenesses of our respective genitalia on display. At first, the exhibit is amazing… but, after half a dozen plastinated bodies, it actually gets kind of old. Or maybe it’s just less disturbing, I’m not sure. At any rate, although we enjoyed Body Worlds 2, we were glad we hadn’t come to Cleveland just to see that.
After we left the Body Worlds 2 exhibit, we went ahead and checked out the rest of the Science Center. Played with all the fun hands-on gadgets, like the Blue-Man-Group-esque PVC pipe organ, and the slightly modified theremin they had set up, and the giant vortex cannon (shooting smoke rings is fun!), and lots of other stuff that kept us occupied for a while more.
Then it was late afternoon, and it was time to drive home.
All in all, we had a fun, relaxing, and very different sort of vacation this time around. I definitely enjoy getting out of town for a few days, seeing different scenery, that sort of thing, and this vacation really hit the spot.
I’ll post pictures of our vacation once I get the film back. I’m afraid my Holga pics won’t turn out, though, because I discovered (after we got home) that I’d left the shutter on the “bulb” setting after the July 4th fireworks experiment. So, all my Amish Country pics from the Holga will probably be blurry and overexposed. Meh. At least I brought my Minolta and my Lomo, too.