These Are The Days: Center of Science and Industry

This past weekend, my wife and I got to do something very special. It just happened to come up that our oldest niece was heading down to Hocking Hills Ohio with some of her friends from high school for the weekend to do some hiking and bonding. Which meant her daughter would have to hang out with her grandma and grandpa for the weekend. The only problem was, they were already planning on heading down to Virginia to watch their youngest daughter play softball, so @mrsbozz and I were more than happy to step in and babysit for the weekend.

The key highlight of our trip being a visit to COSI in downtown Columbus Ohio. This wasn't the first time I have ever been here. In fact, I can still remember visiting probably about fifteen years ago with our great nieces mother when she was about seven. I'm a big science nerd, so I was more than happy to get back to COSI. Plus it was something different than the Columbus Zoo which is where our great niece goes a lot.

I'm sure @ericvancewalton has many fond memories of COSI from his time growing up in the Columbus area.

The funny thing is, we probably only visited about 1/3 of the museum during our time there. There is a section on the top floor of COSI that is geared specifically towards small children like our great niece. It's mostly just a playground with all kinds of cool interactive things for the kids to do. Light on science, heavy on activity. We took her up there after I got a glimpse of the cars and four wheeler that you see in the photos above.

I didn't take a ton of photos of the play area, though @mrsbozz apparently did take some unflattering photos of me as you can see above. There were just too many kids running around and though I doubt anyone would have said anything, I didn't really want to be "that guy".

There was a section where they had all kinds of vehicles the kids could climb around on complete with flashing lights and sounds. It was pretty cool. They also had a water table area that you see in the opening photo as well as a bunch of other stuff I didn't take photos of.

They also had a special exhibit that was dedicated to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme. She is a big fan of that right now, so that was kind of the main reason we brought her here. We thought it was going to be too old for her, but she seemed to understand what was going on just fine. Unfortunately, this area was an absolute madhouse, so I got zero pictures of the exhibit. I'm sure if you are really curious you can find it online or at the link I shared above for COSI.

The views from the museum are pretty awesome and during one of the times our great niece was climbing around on the vehicles I turned and took this shot out one of the windows. In the foreground you can see a police trailer that they were loading a horse into for the mounted units. There was a home football game this day and they had just had the relay for life marathon that morning, so the police presence was significant.

One of the most memorable parts of the museum is an area they have set up called "Progress". It's basically a little town that you can walk down mainstreet and see how things have changed over the years. From an old school horse and buggy and pharmacy to a diner and hardware store. It's a pretty cool life size diorama. We actually sat at the diner counter for a while as a young boy and girl pretended to work behind the counter as their mother watched them.

I had to wait for the one kid to get out of the way, but eventually in the diner I was able to get a shot of the cash register with the $.05 marker rung up. I did that in homage to the current price of HIVE which is sitting around the $.05 mark.

After walking through this area of the museum we decided we didn't want to press our luck with the little one. She was in fairly good spirits, but if she suddenly got hungry or was ready for her nap things might turn on us. Actually, that's not true, she's the sweetest little thing, but we were getting hungry, so we called it a morning and headed out. Like I said, we didn't even walk through a lot of the exhibits in the museum, but as much as I might have liked them, I think they may have been a bit above the age range of our little one. I'm sure one day when she is older we will head back though!

After her afternoon nap, we headed back out to a local bookstore, and then we spent some time in one of the many parks around the Columbus metro area before we headed to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants in the area called El Vaquero (the cowboy). Those are two separate dishes in the photos above, but they are both chicken.

I'm going to include this as a #wednesdaywalk post sponsored by @tattoodjay, given the fact that I racked up almost 6500 steps this day chasing around the little one. I honestly would have thought it had been higher than that.

Overall, it was an amazing day full of so much laughter and love. It makes me sad that we live four hours away from them, but it also makes the time we do get with them so much sweeter!

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