Turkey Week: Perot Museum

We finally made it to the Perot Museum today. Well, Troy and I did. My wife decided to start cleaning her closet out, while we waited for Troy to get ready. And then once she had started, she didn’t feel like stopping, so she stayed home again.

Apparently, everyone else had the same idea as us, because the museum was packed. In fact, we couldn’t even find parking, so we had to park a couple of miles away and walk back. Luckily, we already had tickets, so we skirted the long line at the ticket desk and went right in. We arrived at the museum around 11 o’clock. I assumed we’d spend a few hours there and leave for lunch. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We were there for four hours, because Troy had to look at every single thing on every single floor, even though he’s seen them multiple times before. By the time we finally left, I was starving and getting hangry.

They had a new exhibit on the dinosaur floor called Raptor Dancing. There was a camera that would pick up your movements and then project a mimic of those movements onto the wall, but as a velociraptor. Three people could dance simultaneously, and they had music playing overhead. It was a lot of fun to watch the kids showing off their dance moves. It was even more fun to watch the raptors trying to awkwardly do the same things. We had kids and raptors breakdancing, dabbing, discoing, moon walking, electric sliding, and even kung fu fighting. It was, by far, Troy’s favorite part of the entire museum experience. He kept making me take him back to it. Heck, he even somehow managed to get me to get out there and dance! My raptor was busting a move, while Troy’s raptor tried to repeatedly punch me in the face.

The other area that we spent a great deal of time in was the robotics room. Troy was determined to drive every single robot, even though most of them were clones of each other. He even tried his hand at building one. Then, we moved over to the body room, where troy found an exhibit that you walked through, and the computer would analyze your gait to tell you the length of your stride and the speed of your walk. After he saw some boy run through it instead of walking, Troy decided to try that too. That started off a group of boys, running through the machine over and over again and trying to run faster than each other. Troy’s top speed was 10.4 mph, which ended up being the fastest of the group! I mean, that’s not bad, considering the “track” was only about ten feet long. So, the experiment was based more on acceleration, rather than top speed.

As previously mentioned, I was extremely hungry by this point, so I had zero interest and zero patience with continuing our stay in the museum. So, after one more go at the Raptor Dancing, I finally drug Troy out of the building. We stopped at Pie Five Pizza on the way home to grab a late lunch and early dinner. We had the whole restaurant to ourselves, and it was nice to sit, watch a movie, and enjoy a pizza with my son. I was in a much better mood after I ravenously devoured my pizza in record time.