5th November, 2011
Today me and John went to Hutchinson, Kansas. It is about 45 mins north of Wichita and they have two cool-looking museums there. The Salt Mine is the only mine you can visit in the Western Hemisphere. You can visit one in Wieliczka, Poland (which I visited) and one in Salzburg. So I had something to compare it to. Being over 600 feet below the earth's surface is cool but, unlike the mine in Poland, they didn't have any salt sculptures to impress visitors. There was a train and a dark ride which were nice but they didn't really have much to show us, except how the miners worked, which wasn't that interesting. It was cool to find out that there is a vault that stores documents for people and organisations in the mine. Underground is the safest place to store important documents. Hollywood stores movie reels and other things in the vault.
After this, we went to Yoder to eat in an Amish restaurant. I don't know if the restaurant was actually run by Amish but they all wore Amish-style outfits. We got a huge 3 course lunch, which we couldn't finish. It was a really hearty meal.
Museum 2 was the Cosmosphere. This is a museum about air and space. It has a huge collection, second only to the Air and Space Museum in DC. Above is some plane whose name I forget. It is John's favorite plane, which says something as John is an aeronautical engineer. The museum was very well laid out and traces the evolution of space travel, from Hitler's WW2 rockets to the present day. We also watched a film about tornadoes in the Imax theatre - appropriate for Kansas. We booked tickets for the planetarium but were sold seats to a private screening for a scout group. So we actually got all our money back, which was nice.
It's really strange that these two museums are in a small town in the middle of Kansas as they are both pretty significant. They are two of the 8 wonders of Kansas.
No comments:
Post a Comment