Day 3.040: Harry Potter and the Family of Fire

This morning we had tickets to visit Harry Potter - The Exhibition at the Museum of Science in Boston.  The picture of the dome is taken from outside our hotel - so as you can see we did not have far to go.  The exhibition allows no photography, so it was a relief that they had put this knight from the giant wizard-chess set in the foyer for photography-obsessives.  The exhibition was great - not strong on science of course, but very nicely put together.  Exile #4 was sorted - into Gryffindor of course and all three kids had a go at repotting a mandrake and scoring a goal with a quaffle. The real star of the show were the costumes, sets and props from the films though - beautiful and incredibly detailed when you see them up-close.

Afterwards, we ventured out into the real museum - this is just one wing of it:

The museum was very crowded despite its huge size (I dread to think what it will be like tomorrow when the weekend hits) so it was an extraordinary and delightful surprise to run into friends here - it was great for the kids to share the experience with a couple of their friends and nice for us to be able to shuffle the supervision permutations with another outnumbered Mom.

After a pause for lunch, we managed to keep going until about 3pm when we were all flagging, so we returned to the hotel for an hour or so of down-time, then had some dinner before returning to get the most out of our day's admission charges. By then the museum was slightly less insanely busy and we were able to spend a bit more time with some of the more complicated exhibits. We learned about nanoscale self-assembly with the help of a mini air-hockey table and some magnetic counters and experimented with levers and pendulums in a children's playground. We also discovered that we're quite hot stuff (well I had to get a group shot in somehow!)



What a packed day - we're quite tired now - in fact everyone else (including Exile #2) is asleep while I'm typing - I think I should join them.