A Year of Museum Visits

For Christmas this year, I gave Tammy a gift of 'a museum a month'. I research an area museum for that month which we then visit on a Saturday. 

In January, we visited the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History in West Hartford.  They had a special exhibit on the Wide Awakes and another exhibit on Coffee in CT.  We just happened to visit the Saturday they were offering a docent led tour about the coffee exhibit, as well as, a talk from the local owner of Giv coffee on fair trade practices.  He had samples of his coffee which I tried. I mention this only because I don't drink coffee and haven't tried it since before college.  There was also the permanent exhibit concerning CT's history.  All told, we spent four hours here and no money as we secured free admission tickets from our local library.  We capped off the day at the French restaurant Avert Brasserie for a nice prix fixe dinner.

For February, we drove to Amherst College in Massachusetts for a two-fer.  We began at the Mead Art Museum.  It was small consisting of one floor of art work that was rhetorically social in nature.  We then headed over to the Beneski Museum of Natural History.  The museum has the largest collection of dinosaur tracks in the world and includes the first dinosaur tracks ever studied by a scientist.  We spent around three hours between the two museums and zero dollars as both are free to the public.  For dinner we walked the half mile or so to downtown Amherst and ate at the MoMo Tibetan Restaurant and visited a few shops before heading home.