But when Bonny Annie told me that her tutorial’s history club was planning a trip to the Bethesda Museum, I was like, “Huh?!”  The unincorporated area of Bethesda is approximately six miles from our house, we’ve lived here for almost eight years, and I was unaware that Bethesda had anything more than grass, cows, beautiful country homes, a gas station and an elementary school. 

Well, apparently they also have a museum.

Our arrival in the parking lot and view of the building did nothing to bump up my enthusiasm.

Neither did the sign that greeted us at the front door.

The little man who served as our tour guide began his speech by telling us that he had a chronic cough and that if he had one of his coughing fits to not worry, that he was not spreading germs.  I’m still trying to figure that one out, but I still kept Jack Henry, who was strapped to me in the Ergo carrier, at least ten feet or so away from him.

Despite my initial skepticism and suspicions of our coughing guide, I enjoyed the thirty minutes or so that I spent browsing the roughly 2,000 square feet of the Bethesda Museum.

They actually have a pretty interesting array of things there.

Who remembers Diet Rite?  And why is it so difficult to find soda in glass bottles nowadays anyway?  It always tastes better in glass bottles.

Harrison wanted to know what this was…

And I told him it was what parents thunked their kids with when they made too much noise in tiny, dusty museums.

Just kidding.  I told him it was an iron, and that we had an electric one at home.  He said he’d never seen it.  And then I thunked him.

I liked their quilt display.  I like to think about the women who hand-stitched them, about who they were, what they were like, and if they too needed to thunk their children.

I love old books, especially ones like this.

Picnic fun from the tree-top house?  I have to find a copy of this.

Mow-pram rides?  Charming.  Dangerous, but charming.

I would not have wanted the job of running this scoreboard.

Leave it to Harrison to find the Lego predecessors.

They also had several shelves of more modern specimens.  I think we had a camera just like this.

And I remember this…

We had the Atari, which I think came a little after the Odyssey.  I’m a little concerned about the packaging…

The mind of a compute…?  I’m hoping it was the archaic technology of the early 80s that caused the makers to miscalculate how much room they needed on their box to finish their sentence.  Well, actually it’s a dependent clause masquerading as a sentence, but we don’t need to get technical here.

And, of course, no museum collection is complete without a Commodore 64.

Annaleigh browsed around a little more with her friends, but at this point, I had to go wait in the car because Cap’n Jack Henry was tired of trying to stuff my necklace in his mouth and was starting to grunt and bounce a lot.

So, what’s your take-home from my Tuesday afternoon experience?  Find the smallest, most obscure area on your surrounding map and find out if they have a museum with a coughing guide.  You’ll enjoy it.

You know, I don’t think that little man coughed one time, now that I think about it.