Utah Adventures

Episode 305 – Poop Shoot Shoot

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Hey there loyal followers believe it or not the month of March has just about come to end and that means it’s Utah Adventure week.

First thing first, we start off this episode talking about Julias new shop. The Pleiadian Alter has finally found a home in the Murray area (next to Wheeler Historic Farm). Stay tuned for the address and opening date coming soon.

Conceptual photo by Julia Gates

Bre has an exciting colonoscopy story, thus the Poop Shoot, Shoot! Chris and Jeremy give us a gardening update. We get the rundown on the USMNT & the upcoming World Cup. In a funny twist of fate Jeremy goes to Dancing With the Stars Live. “At least the music was good.”

But let’s get to the meat and potatoes of this episode, ‘The Leonardo’ an interactive museum in Downtown SLC. Located at 209 East 500 South Library Square. Salt Lake City, Utah 84111. Currently the main exhibit is all about flight. It was originally installed in 2016 and has run for 6 years with little to no updates. They are currently running the Van Gough 360 experience but at a staggering $30 per person we opted to go through the general admission experience.

We all agree that if you are a school age child going to the Leonardo for a field trip (with a museum guide) it would probably be a blast. Some of the exciting things they have are an actual A C-131 cargo plane you can sit in. You can push the knobs and pretend to fly the plane….upon exiting there is a twisty slide going out the rear of the plane. They also have a Soviet made MiG-21 that flew in the Polish Air Force hanging from the ceiling.

When you enter the main exhibit, you go through the ‘Tunnel of Dreams’ and illuminated arch with hand drawn blueprint like objects depicting early concepts of flight. At the end of the tunnel is the re-creation of a 1969 living room the children watching the moon landing.

They have Colonel Scott Nowlin’s flight suit along with Senators Jake Garns payload suit from his 1985 trip to space.

Unfortunately, this 6-year-old exhibit is in desperate need of updating, repair, and some basic interpretation. There is little to no instruction on the exhibits and the staff seemed short handed the day we were there. Had one of the staff members not stumbled upon us and pointed out how some of the exhibits worked we would have never known what we were looking at. For example, they have a plane engine that you can move and see how the parts work, but with no instruction one would never figure it out on their own.

There are lots of interactive stations, with no explanation as to what they are or what you are supposed to do. The second floor was not much better. The exhibit on black history of flight had some cool pictures but little to no explanation for any of it. The xray room was cool but made no sense and had no explanation as to what it was or why it was there.

We did find the interactive art studio. They had clay and small area where you could make squares for the museum’s patchwork quilt.

We really love Utah, and we want to love the Leonardo, but to be honest it was a lackluster experience and even though we only paid $5.00 to get in that almost felt like a rip-off. In conclusion, if you were already downtown and had an hour to kill, the $5.00 might be worth it. You kids will LOVE going there for a field trip, but if you are planning on taking the family there for the day….go to the Clark Planetarium a few blocks away, it was free to get in and they have lots more to see and do. Perhaps the Van Gogh 360 was amazing, but once again for $30 a person we just didn’t feel like it was worth it.

We sincerely hope the Leonardo will update their exhibits and once again give us a reason to be excited to attend.

We will ALWAYS love your “likes” BUT don’t forget to click that little SHARE button (or retweet) *sharing IS indeed caring* You can find us and subscribe on Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Itunes, IHeartRadio, Google Play, and TuneIN. Leave us a review and Follow us on the Twitter @tnupodcast, Instagram @Tnupodcast, or on Facebook The New Utah Podcast

Episode 300 – Fire Crotch

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Hey, Folks!  I can’t believe it.  We hit 300 continuous episodes this week and it’s our Utah Adventure Week.  Y’all hit the jackpot with this episode!

Starting out with our rambling intro, we talk about recording on Two’s Day (2/22/22).  Yes, I’m a dork because I think it’s cool and used it all day in my email signature.  Jeremy and Julia talk about heading out for the annual boar hunt.  This year Julia is hoping to bag a boar because someone has requested one through her shop (listen to last week’s episode to hear more details about her business, The Pleiadian Altar. 

Chris and I are back from our short little cruise to Ensenada, Mexico, where we stayed on the cruise ship and just had a relaxing little vacation.    Cruising is one of our preferred means of travelling.  Also, my colonoscopy was not February 25th but March 25th, so I promise to provide riveting information next month for those of you who are getting old like me.

Last item as we transition into our adventure is Jeremy’s new chicken.  It’s either Puff Daddy or One-Eyed Willy.  We talk about what jerks chickens are and where the term ‘hen-pecked’ came from.

Wikipedia, Mike Murray

Onto the exciting adventure. This month we went to Clark Planetarium in The Gateway.  Utah’s planetarium goes back to 1964 when Gail Plummer, a professor at the University of Utah expressed interest in converting our old library (we’d outgrown our second Salt Lake City library space at 500 South 200 East).  At that time Plummer convinced Beatrice Hansen to donate $400,000 to fund the new Hansen Planetarium, in memory of her late husband.    When Mrs. Hansen passed away, the building was renamed the Mr. and Mrs. George T Hansen Planetarium, Space Science Library and Museum.  During its operation it had the highest per capita attendance of any planetarium in the nation.  It soon outgrew the space and when it moved to The Gateway in April of 2003.  A $1 million donation was made through the Clark Foundation on behalf of Sheila M Clark, and it was renamed the Clark Planetarium.

Bryton Bluth (Jeremy, Julia, Bre & Chris, left to right)

During its time as the Hansen Planetarium, it created the first “pitless” digital dome in the United States.  The dome was innovative and created an amazing opportunity to view education and entertaining information in a 3-D manner without the aid of glasses.  When the planetarium oved to The Gateway, they created a new dome theater.  Two super-high-resolution projectors work together to blend a seamless video stream over the entire dome.  The shows in the dome theater cover a variety of space-related themes and are live-narrated.

The Clark Planetarium is about 10,000 square feet of free exhibits that are interactive, entertaining, and educational.  Listen to hear about our favorite exhibits and experience with them.  One of my favorite exhibits is an infrared camera where we discover my core is literally white hot.  Apparently, I’m always cold because my interior heat does not escape!

Byrton Bluth (Julia & Bre, left to right)

We hope you are enjoying our Utah Aventures as much as we are.  As the weather warms up, you’ll hear us doing more things outside.  If you have any ideas for us, let us know on the socials!!!

Bryton Bluth, (Jeremy & Chris, left to right)

We will ALWAYS love your “likes” BUT don’t forget to click that little SHARE button (or retweet) *sharing IS indeed caring* You can find us and subscribe on Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Itunes, IHeartRadio, Google Play, and TuneIN. Leave us a review and Follow us on the Twitter @tnupodcast, Instagram @Tnupodcast, or on Facebook The New Utah Podcast

Episode 296 – A Raft of Otters

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Utah Adventure Week – Loveland Living Planet Aquarium

This week Julia announces that she’s added an event calendar to her website for The Pleiadian Altar.  Take a few minutes and find out where she’ll be hocking her wares!  Black Rabbit Studios sends us our promised gifts.  We’re going to spread the love by putting some on our travelling suitcase and sharing the wealth between the four of us.

This week we are starting a new monthly spotlight.  After some on-episode discussion, it will be called the Utah Weekly Adventure.  We start off our tourn at the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium

You know where it is, just on the west side of I15 at 120the South. Do you know why you know?  Because instead of allowing U2 to scrap their stage from their 360 Tour, they are now using it as part of the Aquarium’s educational area.

Mental Floss

The Loveland Living Planet Aquarium was started in 1997 by Brent Anderson, a marine biologist and Utah native.  He started with a mobile educational marine exhibit in 199 and opened the 10,000 square foot location at the Gateway Mall in 2004.  This enabled Anderson to raise funds and to garner interest in the endeavor.  They had over 300,000 visitors in the first two years and quickly outgrew their space.  In June of 2006, the moved to their space in Sandy, which was over 43,000 square feet and soon had over 460,000 visitors each year.  Finally in 2010, they purchased 17 acres of land and raised $27 million to build the Aquarium in its permeant home, Draper.  Currently the Aquarium is 136,000 square feet and was opened in March of 2014 and saw over one million visitors in the first year.

There are five areas to visit at the Aquarium so I’m going to give a little overview of the order we saw each of them:

  1. Journey to South America.  Our first impression was of the climate control.  It was humid and warm inside to mimic weather for the animals and plants living inside.  We saw the electric eel, a sloth, porcupine, toucan, poisonous frogs, and empty butterfly exhibit.  It was really cool to see the indigenous plants that were included with identification signs.  Julia confessed that she used to be afraid of the river monster fish and was terrified that she might fall into the tank.
Loveland Living Planet Aquarium
  • Penguin Research Station.  When we arrived, they were feeding the penguins and talking about how they take care of them.  Each penguin is labeled so they can monitor their food intake and the lights and temperature in the enclosure are controlled to imitate their natural environment (Sub-Antarctic islands).  The lights go up and down according to what would be happening in the wild.  Many of the penguins at the Aquarium were actually born there and you can read a little bit about each of them. 
Utah Family Magazine
  • Expedition: Asia. There are two clouded leopards in this exhibit; however, we were only able to see one for a short time.  What a treat that was though!  There were a lot of giant and colorful fish!
Loveland Living Planet Aquarium
  • Discover Utah.  We have determined that Utah has boring fish, but you can see the brine shrimp in this exhibit.  This is also where we saw the otters come out to have a little food stimulated learning and an active beehive.  Utah is a beautiful place and watching the otters play was one of the highlights of our day.
Bragging Mommy
  • Ocean Explorer:  This exhibit has a place where you can touch sea urchins, star fish, sea cucumbers, and anemones. They also have a stingray pond where you can reach out and pet them!  This is where we saw the seahorses and dragons, the giant octopus, giant clam, and the giant lobster, along with bioluminescent fish. There is a really cool shark tank with a tunnel you can walk through so you are surrounded by the beautiful creatures.  Just outside the tunnel is a show area where you can see the same tank from the side.
Utah.com

You can buy a membership, eat there and when it opens again, they have a 4D theater.  They offer shark yoga, nature storytime and youth camps.  You can rent the Aquarium for private events like weddings, proposals, and family parties.  Both indoor and outdoor spaces are available and there are times when you can rent out the entire Aquarium.  Additionally, the Aquarium is in the process of adding on hands on learning as well as science labs.  (Chris may have a recording of this information)

We loved this episode and our first adventure.  Join us next month as we continue to explore Utah for ourselves!

We will ALWAYS love your “likes” BUT don’t forget to click that little SHARE button (or retweet) *sharing IS indeed caring* You can find us and subscribe on Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Itunes, IHeartRadio, Google Play, and TuneIN. Leave us a review and Follow us on the Twitter @tnupodcast, Instagram @Tnupodcast, or on Facebook The New Utah Podcast