At COSI Day 1

So we piled in the car and started to drive to Columbus, Ohio.

A nice warm day and just as we crossed the Ohio state line it started to rain, and it kept raining al the way to Columbus. Not a light rain either, but flood advisory type rain.

Rain notwithstanding and while it was still pouring, we arrived at COSI.

As a result, the first set of doors at the front were held open by people running back and forth, and we similalry dashed into the entrance, past the second set of glass door and headed in.

The second set of doors were clear.

Why does this matter? Well it was only at the end of the day as we were leaving, with the front doors closed that I saw this sign, which had previously been invisible as it was only the side of the door and not the front nor back that was visible on entry:

It's a Good Thing, considering I wouldn't have realized that it was improper to do so until I left that day, that I wasn't carrying my M&P 40c concealed in a Vanguard holster completely concealed under a sweater then, now wasn't it?

So we got our tickets and also signed up for an extra Adventure in the Valley of the Unknown for the kids, which is what we did first.

The adventure is an interactive exhibit where kids have to solve puzzles, seek hidden symbols and try to reason their way into the locked observatory to find knowledge.

The maze had numerous tricky puzzles to solve including on that closed sets of doors, trapping you inside until you figured out the right sequence, a laser-beam filled passageway that you ahd to maneuver through to get a hidden symbol and much more. The layered puzzles took quite a bit of time and the kids found it interesting and at times scary.

The staff at the Adventure exhibit were very good at pateintly assiting them find the missing symbols when needed and coaching them on steps to figure puzzles out while leaving it up to them to solve them.

But they persevered and made it into the observatory where they could find the following stele:

They then had to decode the stele. here's a hint, the first line reads: Seek

The second reads: Challenge of the worthy.

Abby really got into decoding the stele, the kid's got a future with the NSA methinks.

She then went on to decode the second stele:

By this point Leah was bored so she and Tash headed to the Curious George exhibit while Abby kept on decoding.

My bet is Borepatch can decode these with one hand tied behind his back without breaking a sweat....

We had lunch in the COSI cafeteria and the food was surprisingly decently priced, and quite tasty. This was a refreshing change from the average museum or science center cafe with subpar food at way over par prices.

Next we did the Ocean exhibit, where they proceeded to get a bit wet while doing the hands-on experiments.

They got soaked the most positioning a ball on a water spout so it would hang suspended on the water and not fall off, and they managed to do it after only a few tries:

They even went into a research submarine:

After that they had frozen yogurt made by a robot.

This answers the question as to what fast food places will do if minimum wage is pushed up to $15/hr - get robots:

Give a robot a properly setup workstation and simple parameters and can easily make a frozen yogurt to order - or flip burgers for that matter.

After the frozen yogurt they declared they were all done, so after about 5 hours at COSI the rain had stopped and we headed to the hotel and went for a swim in the pool. Then we had dinner, went to bed and prepared for COSI day 2. it was a fantastic first day at COSI.