We started collecting magnets from our home school field trips several years ago.  Big D made this board for us out of an old piece of scrap metal that he had just laying around in the garage.  It used to be white and hang in our school room.  Now we don’t have a school room anymore, and the board is some kind of psychedelic mix of red and blue, and it hangs in a little hallway entering into Dirty Harry’s room.

Despite the alterations to the board’s appearance and location, we have a had a fun time with this collection over the years.  Whenever we go somewhere that has a gift shop, the kids look forward to choosing the magnet that will grace our board.  It’s a fairly inexpensive way to commemorate the trip, and storage isn’t a problem either, like it might be if we had chosen to collect…oh, say posters or snow globes or even shot glasses.

We’ve procured some of them from local trips…

…but mostly we’ve picked them up at places we visit when we travel.  Like most good, dutiful homeschoolers, we try to mix business with pleasure and learn from the places we tour.

Like Chicago…

And Kansas City…

and Alabama…

It’s even better when we can visit family and score a field trip or two while visiting with them.

Like in Charleston, SC…

Or in North Carolina…

Or Georgia…

Every time I look at that magnet I remember that I almost died trying to hike all those wretched stairs.  See how pleasant a magnet board can be?  Helping you to recall near-death experiences?

And then, of course, there was the mother-of-all-field trips…

Don’t laugh.  Parts of Animal Kingdom and Epcot Center are very educational.  At least that’s what I keep trying to tell Big D in my attempts to talk him into taking us there again soon.

I encourage you to start your own field trip magnet board.  Or if you don’t have wall space for a psychedelic painted piece of metal, then just use your handy-dandy refrigerator.  It is a fun way to look back upon your on-the-road educational experiences!

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.