Science Museum of Minnesota

The Science Museum is a wonderful place to spend pretty much an entire day. We were talking about going alot over the winter and decided the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit sounded pretty interesting so it was worth making a trip over there. After some further research we discovered that the cost of becoming a member was actually a good investment - it would save us money on the Dead Sea Scrolls, admission and Omnitheater tickets combined.

Members pretty much get free Omnitheater tickets and museum admission and then discounts on special exhibits, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and also parking and gift shop discounts as well. We joined under the dual person membership. $69 dollars gets us into the museum as many times as we want for an entire year.

So on Palm Sunday, we called my in-laws who also decided it would be fun to go and we decided to head over there for the afternoon. We left around noon and made it to the museum a little after 12:30. We had 1:00 Omnitheater tickets and 3:00 Dead Sea Scroll tickets. This ended up working out just about right.

The Omnitheater show was Arabia and it was really interesting. We saw a great deal of history of Saudi Arabia and how it got to where it is today in the oil industry. The music was awesome and made me want to eat indian food!

After the Omnitheater we only had about a half hour before we could go get in line for the Dead Sea Scrolls. My mother in law and sister in law were hungry, so we stopped for a snack and then had little time to play before getting in line. We got into the queue for the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Ok, I won't go into much detail about the Dead Sea Scrolls since it won't always be there - but I can say this, while I'm glad we went to see it, I'm not sure it was worth it. They took people in every 15 minutes, but there were so many artifacts and things to see that folks lingered a long time in each room, making it difficult to get through the entire exhibit. The scrolls themselves were incredible to see. At the end was also an exhibit on the St. John's Bible - now I have been very interested in seeing this illuminated bible - but I wasn't expecting it so it was hard to get in the right frame of mind for it. They either should have advertised it with this or not had it at all. Being that it was Palm Sunday I am wondering if this exhibit was even busier than it would be if we went back now. It is there through October. I don't think we'll go see it again though. Interesting, but time consuming.

By the time we finished the Dead Sea Scrolls it was pretty late in the day, we were hungry and tired, so we just wrapped it up and went home. I have seen many of the regular exhibits there before, but it has been quite some time, so I'd like to go back on a day that we could enjoy walking through some of those as well.

But, we're members now, so that wouldn't be hard to do! I'd like to go to the Big Backyard there this summer and play mini golf and also see as many of the different Omnitheater shows that come as possible. It's fun to have a museum like this in our town and fun for all ages!

Details:
Science Museum of MN
120 W. Kellogg Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55102
(651) 221-9444
www.smm.org
info@smm.org