Sacramento Museum Day

Need I say more?

For those of you who know my wife Carolyn, this about says it all. For those who are less familiar with Carolyn, I will explain. Museum Day in Sacramento is always on the first Saturday of February. On that day all the museums in town throw their doors wide open, eliminating the entrance price for that day, and hope for the best. Many of the museums schedule special programs or raise funds by selling hot dogs and chili. The city provides a couple of busses which circle a route that connects many of the downtown museums, thus eliminating or at least reducing the parking and traffic problems in those areas.

Carolyn likes museums and can take about 4 times as much of one as I can. In fact, I enjoy visiting museums via coffee table picture book. I don't need all the walking and sore feet and whiny kids. But I humor her and go along and have a good time in spite of my grouchy attitude.

This year we managed to talk Ed and his family to join us. We also managed to reduce our goals to visiting two museums only.

The first one we went to was the Towe Automobile Museum.

We had been here before but not our kids or grandkids. Even though it was familiar to us, it was still somewhat overwhelming. However, crowd control was well handled and they had relatively inexpensive snacks such as hot dogs, chili, and nacho chips with cheese.

As expected, most of the displays are roped or chained off but there were a few which were designed for hands on experience like this replica of an old Model T Ford. The controlling pedals and levers actually worked allowing the kids to enjoy the feel of working the controls while the docent explained to Carolyn and me how they differed from today's system. The two flipper switches on the steering column, for example, might be windshield wipers and turn signal nowadays but 100 years ago one of those levers was the throttle (gas pedal) while the second was the spark advancer (changed the engine's power and ease of starting).

We might have stayed there much longer but Ed & Taffany's friends had arranged to meet us in Woodland.


Woodland is home to the Heidrich Agriculture History exhibit. Their exhibit, like that of Towe 's automobile musseum was organized more by brand than by functionality or time period. They were somewhat organized by era but there is so much overlap it is difficult to see the organization sometime.


As with the auto exhibit, there was way too much to absorb in one visit. But at least they had half size tractors to keep the youngest visitors quite cemetary. Carolyn and I agreed that this was one place we needed to take any of her brothers.