Weekend Family Travel & Ideas: Aviation Museum

Family Weekend Getaways & Ideas: Aviation Museum

It is cold outside. Which means all of the activities are either subsided or are taken inside. With not as many ways to release their energy and the highs from all of the candy during the holiday season, kids are home and getting restless. A great way to take advantage of all that energy and also for them to learn something is to take them to a museum. These places of various collections have a lot of indoor space and usually are more or less supervised and are great for family winter weekend getaways.

One thing to keep in mind when bringing your child is to determine which museum is right for them and how long you plan on being there. Children’s museums have a lot of interactive exhibits, some offer crafts areas, and other fun activities. These are usually better for the younger kids. They are more likely to be engaged and playing for a bit longer period of time. This also means they will get hangry and need to make sure you plan for a snack break. Pack a backpack with water and light dry snacks for your trip.
History and cultural museums tend to be more adult and older children oriented, so you would want to make sure that you are planning to be there for only a couple hours before your child starts the get antsy.

Over the weekend we took our energizer bunny to the Cradle of Aviation Museum

Kids young and old will like this place. While our kiddo found the place interesting and exciting, so did I.

There was a lot to do and touch. There were full-size displays of airplanes. From the first ever invented to the jetliner to the fighter jets. The exhibits were exhilarating. You went through the entire history of the aviation. It takes you step by step of the design and testing of new planes and how they were used in commercial flying and war. Moreover, at just about every exhibit there were interactive screens and games set up. At the Jet hanger, you can actually get into a small cockpit and play a simulation flight game.

At the space exploration section, you can complete a mission of packing for the space flight, control a land rover on Mars, and even build your own spacecraft based on your destination and plans you chose. There is a display of the replica Lunar lender with a spaceman suit included.

There is a lot of information and displays on how things work and how planes fly. Kids of all ages would find this fun, but older ones would get science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) type of insights from the exhibits and games.

There is also onsite Planetarium with a show called Current Night Sky – Space Lab. Just like in other planetariums they turn off the lights and take you on a journey around our solar system and different constellations that are around us. Most of them are not visible to us these days due to the light pollution in most of our towns. So this was a great opportunity to see some of the well known, such as Ursa Major and Orion, as well as other constellations. We found out that there are a total of 88 constellations. This was the first-ever trip to a planetarium for the kiddo, and she loved it, even had a question in the end for the guide about the Unicorn constellation.

Museums are great for getting energy out and learning. And you can visit these and save some money. There are discounts available for various museums through CityPASS, local libraries also offer great discounts by just having a library card. You can find out more and who participates here culturepass.nyc/organizations. You can also visit during museum free or discounted days.

Did you know?:
American Museum of Natural History, one of the top 10 things to do with kids in NYC, has pay-what-you-wish admission. That means you can pay as little as $1 or anything else you can afford or wish to donate to the museum. The drawback here is that you would need to wait in line to get the ticket vs getting them online ahead of time.

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