Museum Day in Wilmington NC

Hi Blog! Today is Friday, January 9, 2015.  It is our first full day in Wilmington, North Carolina. Our friends, Ginny and Eric LaJuene, have decided to join us for some RV adventure. Our first stop was the Cape Fear Museum. Cape Fear Museum collects, preserves and interprets objects relating to the history, science, and cultures of the Lower Cape Fear region. Here we are at the start of our adventure.

As soon as we entered the museum, we got up close and personal with one of Wilmington's oldest residents - the Giant Ground Sloth. This bad boy stood a staggering seven meters tall, and weighed a whopping seven tons! Megatherium, which means giant beast, lived from some 35 million years ago until around 11,000 years ago, which coincides with the last Ice Age. He was so large we couldn't get all of him in the photo!

On our drive to Wilmington, we saw lots of signs for Cape Fear this and Cape Fear that, but we really didn't know exactly what Cape Fear was all about. Good thing we found the Cape Fear Museum. Now we know that Cape Fear is a coastal plain and tidewater region of North Carolina centered about the city of Wilmington. The region takes its name from the adjacent Cape Fear headland, as does the Cape Fear River, which flows through the region and empties into the Atlantic Ocean near the cape. Here Dave found Cape Fear on the map.

Fort Fisher was a Confederate fort during the American Civil War. It protected the vital trading routes of the port at Wilmington, North Carolina, from 1861 until its capture by the Union in 1865. This diorama depicts the January 15, 1865 battle when 8,000 Union soldiers attacked by land. Later this week we plan to visit Fort Fisher and learn more about Wilmington's role in the Civil War.

Wilmington is very proud of their adopted son, Michael Jordan. While Jordan was born in Brooklyn, New York, his family moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, when he was a toddler. Jordan attended Emsley A. Laney High School in Wilmington. Jordan was recruited by numerous college basketball programs, including Duke, North Carolina, South Carolina, Syracuse, and Virginia. In 1981, Jordan accepted a basketball scholarship to North Carolina, where he majored in cultural geography. Jordan is a big supporter of the Care Fear Museum and the Museum is a big fan of Michael Jordan.

The Michael Jordan Discovery Gallery encourages the young and the young at heart to get their hands on the Lower Cape Fear’s environment. Crawl inside a beaver lodge, feed a Venus’ Flytrap, make sand dunes and even listen to what a tree has to say. Here Ginny is feeding Dave to the Venus Fly Trap.

All that discovery builds a powerful thirst. The intrepid explorers did what any visitor to a new land would do. They just followed the billboards along the highway straight to the Front Street Brewery - Wilmington's first brew pub and restaurant. There were nine brews on tap, so two 5 beer samplers where ordered and shared around. The Dram Tree Scottish Ale was the crowd favorite. The good was mighty tasty, too. If you visit Wilmington, make sure you make a stop at Front Street Brewery.

Having satisfied our hunger and quenched our thirst, it was time to do some more exploring. Just down the road was the Wilmington Railroad Museum located in an authentic 1883 railroad freight warehouse once owned by the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.

Started in 1979 by three women and a table of ACL Railroad artifacts, the Wilmington Railroad Museum was dedicated to preserving the rich history of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad and the history of railroading in the southeastern United States. For more than 125 years, railroading was Wilmington's chief industry. While the real train stuff was interesting what really got us going was playing with all the model trains. Here is the Santa Express.

The Museum has more than 20 operating displays in four scales. We must have spent an hour pushing all the buttons to make the trains go around the tracks. This is a scale model of Wilmington from a 1950's photo.

  

Once we finished with the little trains, it was time to go outside and climb aboard the real thing. Here is Dave hobo-ing around.

We were able to climb aboard this 100-year-old steam engine which was put into service in 1910, reliable #250 often pulled trains to and from Fayetteville, about 75 miles away.

Here are Ginny and Eric hanging off the back of the red caboose - a fitting end to our exploration.

Tomorrow we look forward to a visit to Fort Fisher.

P.S. - David found ALL THINGS THOMAS THE TRAIN in this museum and spent the whole afternoon posting photos for Sir William: