My company decided to do a big in-person gathering in Chicago, and since that meant I didn’t need to risk a plane trip masked, Sarah and I decided to road trip there for it. I still spent my time masked and I avoided all the big multi-hundred people ballroom events. But I was there for the team gathering, and I got to see a ton of folks I work with every day. (And I got to complain about work while getting hugs from people also complaining!)

But along the way, Sarah and I decided to make a real trip of it. So we went to the Field Museum.

You have to understand, I love museums. Well, I can take or leave a lot of art museums; I am not the target audience for most art. I don’t “get” abstract art very often, classical art evokes mostly “meh” from me, and a lot of modern art is too raw for me to enjoy. Give me gorgeous glass art like Dale Chihuly, or something meaningful like Keith Haring. Or anything where art and culture and history collide. But just art? Paintings of popes or yellow squares? Eh.

But I will lose hours in a science museum and days in a history museum.

Sarah, thankfully, is like me in that we read all the things. Here’s an exhibit about making a Lakota canoe? Yep, we will sit there and read the entire display. Something interactive with buttons revealing historical facts one by one? We’ll poke those buttons together and make sure we’re both done reading before we hit the next one. A video display? Settle in and just wait for us to watch it all the way through at least once.

There are a *few* topics that bore me, but not many. I can only look at gems for so long, or plants. I mean, yay for multiple different samples of wheat, but I’m not going to gaze at them and commit them to memory the way I am the dinosaur bones or the artifacts of various cultures or the displays about space.

But there is one awkward thing about me and museums and that is that fossils make me feel a little weird. Looking into the fossilized skull of an ancient predator both ignites my prey responses and gives me goosebumps thinking about all those millions of years. I get a similar set of goosebumps around meteorites honestly. I know the fossils aren’t haunted, that Sue the dinosaur isn’t going to come to life and chase me, I know that. But I *feel* it anyway.

So I end up having a slightly hilarious response to all the fossils when I want to stare at them but only from the safety of hiding behind Sarah.

She is very patient.

Here are just a few of the pictures I took:

Sarah on the second floor looking over the main hall with various dinosaur-y things in the background.

Máximo the Titanosaur says hi to you on the second floor!

Sarah in front of the mammoth skeleton with a mastodon in the background. I genuinely wish these things were still around!

Sue, the museum’s very famous T-Rex. She gets a whole light-up display where they highlight the injuries evident in her bones and talk about how cool she is.

Me underneath the Quetzalcoatlus model which…honestly, scared the hell out of me. If THIS thing was still around? Forget it.

Sarah in front of the stegosaurus, which is her favorite.

Triceratops! My favorite of all! I spent so long just staring at her.

There are lots of things I didn’t take pictures of, especially the indigenous art areas. The Field Museum has a full Maori meeting house where you can go inside and see the cosmology carved on the very beams and columns. I had actually been in one before when I was in New Zealand in high school, and this one felt just as sacred and special. We spent a lot of time in there reading everything they would give us and just feeling the energy of such a wonderful thing. But no pictures. That felt profoundly disrespectful, so it just lives in my head.

Anyway, we saw almost everything the Field Museum has to offer in one day and had a blast. If you’re in Chicago, I strongly recommend a visit.