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.
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.
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