Museums

Postcard from Pittsburgh, PA

The Stuck at the Airport team is spending a few days in Pittsburgh, Pennyslvania exploring the airport, of course, but also the museums, restaurants, shops and assorted attractions.

A couple of highlights so far:

Pittsburgh food tour

We joined these adorable kids, their parents and a gaggle of other enthusiastic explorers on a tasting tour of Pittsburgh’s historic market neighborhood – the Strip District – led by Richard, one of the extremely knowledgable and engaging guides from ‘Burgh Bits & Bites Food Tours, which offers tours of half a dozen Pittsburgh neighborhoods and can create custom tours as well.

Heinz History Center

Yes, the Heinz History Center tells the more-interesting-than-you’d imagine story of the H. J. Heinz company. But that’s just one of thousands of the Western Pennsylania stories told in six floors of artifact-filled exhibits that include everything from props and set pieces from from the “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” TV set to memorabilia and dozens of interactive activities in the sports museum spread out over two floors of the center and covering everything from football and hockey to car racing, golf, boxing and more.

More places on our ‘go’ list

National Park Week. Free admission on Saturday

(Sculpture at the Wright Brothers National Monument _courtesy National Park Service)

Most national parks and monuments offer free entry year-round. But there are popular sites that charge visitors an entry fee.

Except, that is, on the handful of days when park fees are waived nationwide.

And Saturday, April 19 – the first day of National Park Week (April 19 to 27), is one of those days.

So, find a park and make it a fun, free day.

The Corning Museum of Glass – new exhibition

In Corning, New York, the Corning Museum of Glass opens its newest temporary exhibition, Brilliant Color, on May 11.

The exhibition celebrates all things colorful in glass with a color wall of rainbow glass and delightful examples of how people of the past brought color into their lives through the science and innovation of beautiful glass objects.

(courtesy of CMoG)

Summer festival season in: Chicago

Chicago hosts the well-known Lollapalooza and the Chicago Blues Festival each summer, but also plenty of other fun ticketed and non-ticketed events, including the Chicago Pride Fest, the Windy City Smokeout, the Chicago Air and Water Show, the Chicago Jazz Festival and several others.

Take a look at the line-up here.

Three places we’d go

The weekend is coming up and, given all the stressful news, we could use a weekend away.

Here are three places on our “We’d go there” list.

Fly to Vancouver International Airport for the cherry blossoms

Vancouver is always a treat, and landing at Vancouver International Airport (YVR) right about now comes with some bonus cherry blossom treats.

Visit Seattle for free museum admissions

In Seattle, museums around the city offer free admission on the first Thursday of each much.

The Museum of Flight is on the list, as is the Seattle Art Museum, the Burke Museum, The Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) The National Nordic Museum and many others.

Tennessee seems cool

We visited Nashville for the first time last summer and vowed to return to Tennessee.

This list of spring and summer festivals throughout the state is filled with great events to build a trip around, including the Tennessee Tulip Festival in Eagleville this weekend, the Flower & Food Festival at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge from April 18 through June 8, and the World’s Biggest Fish Fry in Paris, TN from April 19 to 27 with a parade, carnival, demolitions debry, rodeo, catfish races and more.

Museum Monday: Vancouver BC’s Museum of Anthropology

It’s been a while since we had a chance to visit the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus.

The whole museum was closed for more than a year while seismic upgrades were made to the spectacular Great Hall, which has 50-foot-tall glass walls and displays of Northwest Coast poles, house posts, carved figures, canoes, feast dishes and other objects primarily from the mid-19th century.

Work by contemporary artists are mixed in here and there, and there are other temporary exhibitions as well as permanent galleries, including the Koerner European Ceramics Gallery, which displays one man’s collection of over 600 objects.

Beyond the Great Hall, our favorite part of the museum is the Multiversity Galleries displaying more than 16,000 objects from the museum’s permanent collection in open storage and in enticing pull-out drawers.

Impossible to see in one visit, many of the exhibit groupings were created in consultation with members of the communities whose relatives and ancestors made the pieces on display.

Where to see: one of D.B. Cooper’s parachutes

(D.B. Cooper pink parachute courtesy Washington State History Museum)

The only unsolved commercial airline hijacking in the U.S. remains the November 24, 1971 hijacking of Northwest Orient flight 305 to Seattle by someone who has come to be known as “D.B.” Cooper.

(Sketch courtesy FBI)

In 1971, Cooper boarded a Boeing 727 on Thanksgiving eve, November 24, that was heading from Portland, Oregon to Seattle.

During the flight, he passed a flight attendant a note saying that he had a bomb and would blow up the plane unless he was given $200,000 in $20 bills and some parachutes.

His demands were met and he parachuted out of the plane, with the money, somewhere over southwest Washington State.

In 1980 some of the money was found along the banks of a river. But Cooper remains at large.

And the mystery lingers on.

Cooper’s hijacking demands included four parachutes. He got them but didn’t choose the pink nylon reserve parachute that the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, WA is displaying this fall.

The parachute was part of the evidence the FBI recovered for its hijacking investigation and has since been given to the museum for safekeeping and occasional display.

You can see this parachute and contemplate what you think happened to Cooper and the money from September 22 through November 16, 2014.

If you can, come by the museum on November 14 for the History After Hours program.

I’ll be there for a presentation about some of the weird and wonderful objects, like the D.B. Cooper parachute, that museums rarely or never display.

Here’s a short video about D.B. Cooper from Seattle’s public TV station.