For our second adventure in Illinois, my husband decided going to the Museum of Science and Industry would be a lot of fun for the girls. We had both been before Stormy was born, and loved the place. The museum is located at 5700 S. DuSable, Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60637 in the Hyde Park neighborhood. There is a parking garage for museum guests to use located at E. 57th St. and S. Cornell Avenue. Parking for non-members is $22 per vehicle. The museum itself is $25.95 apiece for adults, and $14.95 for children, ages 3-11.
We purchased our tickets ahead of time, and our entry time was right at opening. My husband had suggested we visit this museum due to Stormy’s ongoing interest in history. The museum is home to U-505 submarine, captured during WWII in June of 1944. The sub is an impressive sight to see, and the exhibits surrounding it, detailing its crew and their capture, as well as how the sub functioned, and much more, was fascinating! The girls each took a turn using a periscope to see if they could spot enemy subs, and the girls also tried their hand at a buoyancy challenge. There was even a recreation of the galley, and the bunk room that the girls could explore. Everything was meticulously detailed, and highly in-depth. Stormy was in heaven!
Tours of the sub itself are offered, but there is an additional fee of $18 for adults and $14 for children 3-11. It was too expensive for all five of us to take a tour, so just Stormy and I got tickets for one of the tours that was just getting underway. To ensure people were able to tour the U-505, large holes were cut into the ship, one at the rear, and one at the front of the ship. We entered the ship through the hole in the rear. Stormy was fascinated! She couldn’t believe men had bunked in the same room as the warheads, and she enjoyed listening to the tour guide talk about the ship. Sadly, the tour isn’t a long one, and, honestly, if we visited in the future, I wouldn’t pay the extra money for the tour. Seeing the sub, and exploring the exhibits surrounding it is the better way to go.
After we rejoined my husband and Rainbow and Pebble, we set off to see the rest of the museum. We visited the exhibit on Farm Tech, where Pebble was now in heaven climbing up into the giant tractors, followed by Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. Then we headed upstairs to an exhibit called the Great Train Story. At Christmas time, we often see a lot of miniature train displays, but the one in this exhibit hall was ginormous! There was a massive replica of Chicago that we could walk around, and we watched trains wind their way across the continent to Seattle. The detail in this model was astonishing. We watched trains cross the Rocky Mountains, dip into valleys, chug past rivers, and wind through Chicago. There were buttons to push that raised or lowered a drawbridge, felled trees, and set off charges. If we thought Pebble loved exploring the farm tech, this was even more amazing. She constantly asked her father or me to pick her up to see something better. Rainbow and Stormy were walking circles around the massive model, pointing out little details they spotted, like flying seabirds, and the Willis Tower lit up.
The model train is located inside the Transportation Gallery, so it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to convince Pebble to move on. She and her sisters climbed aboard an old trolley, and then checked out the cab of a locomotive. Stormy led us into an exhibit on the science of storms where the girls learned about avalanches, tornadoes, and more.
Probably the biggest hit of our visit was an exhibit called the Mirror Maze. We had to walk through a maze made of mirrors where it was hard to tell what was reflection and what was the right way to go. The girls all ended up bumping into mirrors at one point or another, giggling like crazy. When we finally popped out on the other end, the girls turned around and ran back in! We followed them in, and just when we’d think we’d found them, we’d discover we were looking at a reflection. I think the girls could have stayed in the maze for hours, getting lost, and getting found. It was truly unsettling to be in the middle of the maze, and not know which way to go. Of course, it did help that previous visitors had left plenty of fingerprints on the mirrors!
At the time of our visit, the museum was hosting a special exhibit on Pompeii, and Pompeii’s destruction by Mt. Vesuvius. Stormy was super excited to see the posters for the exhibit when we’d walked past them on our way through the entrance hall. Unfortunately, like the tour of the U-505, there was an extra fee associated with the exhibit. My husband and I were both shocked at the amount of money this museum attempted to suck out of the people patronizing it. We paid for parking, entrance tickets, and a tour of the U-505. We couldn’t afford to visit the exhibit on Pompeii, which crushed Stormy. It truly makes no sense why one has to pay to enter the museum, and then has to pay again, and the fees are not little fees. There are exhibits the museum has had for years, ones my husband visited as a child, that now cost extra.
We steered our disappointed kiddo away from Pompeii, and explored the next floor up, learning about the human body, and checking out an airplane. Neither Pebble nor Rainbow have ever been on actual plane before, so they enjoyed exploring the old airliner.
By this point in the day, it was closing in on lunchtime, and we were all getting a bit peckish. We didn’t want to spend even more money downstairs in the food court, and Pebble was shot, so we headed back to our car. All in all, we had a great time, and saw some amazing exhibits, but we had our disappointments as well. Don’t let our disappointments deter you from checking this museum out. It is a wonderful museum, well laid out, with plenty to see and do. My girls would love to go back just to do the mirror maze one more time. Just be prepared to fork over more money than you expected if you plan to do any of their “special” exhibits, or eat lunch there, or visit the gift shop. Happy trails!
