The Cincinnati Museum Center in Cincy’s old train station, Union Terminal, houses the History Museum, Natural History & Sciences Museum, the Duke Energy Children’s Museum, and the OmniMax movie theatre. Dreary, chilly winter days are perfect for such adventures. A while back our Wii’s area attractions application told Ted that one of the world’s largest dinosaur bones had been discovered in China and would be touring to Cincinnati. Armed with that information and the knowledge that the OmniMax was playing a feature on the Hubble Telescope, away we went!
The museums are an all-day thing – lesson learned – unless you purchase a ticket to only one of the three museums, but if you want to do more than one, be sure to set aside the full day for it. We made it through the OmniMax Hubble film, the Natural History & Sciences museum (because that’s where the dinosaur bones exhibit was) and we made through a very small section of the History museum where the holiday model trains exhibit that was (another touring exhibit). We were both pretty impressed with the Union Terminal building, the museum’s use of the space, and their exhibits in general. We would love to come back another day and tour the entire History museum and Children’s museum.
We saw the dinosaur bones, a great exhibit about the mummification process and a mummy named Umi, a large, dark and damp maze-like bat cave, fossils, an exhibit about the glaciers and how they formed Cincinnati during the ice age, an enormous room-sized model of downtown Cincinnati and surrounding areas from the 1940s (very cool!), and the model trains exhibit (which was also really fun). We got to pet a live snake and the OmniMax Hubble film was incredible! If you’ve never seen a film in an OmiMax theater – it’s definitely worth it! It’s like a planetarium where the ceiling is dome shaped and the screen covers a huge semi-circle portion of the ceiling and 3 walls. It looks like you are flying into the movie – it’s nuts! The actual movie was awesome – lots of footage from the astronauts in space as they took missions to fix the telescope – amazing stuff.
We had a great time and it’s definitely somewhere we’d like to come back to and bring visitors in the future!
