Chris Hardie's Blog

This past weekend, we visited the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. I have such fond memories of that building (which I apparently for a long time referred to as "Onion Center", which if you've seen it's shape, isn't entirely unreasonable) - frolicking in the fountain out front, walking around its empty halls that still seemed to wait for a train to deliver some passengers, watching as it was converted into a museum. Now, you have to have to take out a small personal loan just to see a single exhibit there, let alone see a few, but Anna Lisa and I made a day of it anyway. We saw a beautiful, touching Omnimax movie about risking your life on the Alps because you've got something to prove, a neat exhibit on the history and recovered wreckage of a real pirate ship, and more.

Perhaps the highlight was in the natural history museum, where as we exited the cave tour, we stumbled upon a rickety looking old booth that was sort of tucked away from all the newer, more high-tech exhibits. Upon entering the booth, a computer-generated voice (like from 20 years ago) told me that I was going to be tested to see if my sonar navigation abilities (called "echolocation") would allow me to survive as a creature of the night. A tone pulsed, I vigorously spun the flying wheel to compensate, and then a splat noise ended the simulation. Apparently I'd hit the wall. As I backed out of the booth, the old-school voice told me, "you would be a terrible bat." I couldn't agree more.