Explora!

In our continuing effort to explore Albuquerque – we made plans for Friday night with friends to go to Explora! “Explora!” is a science museum in Albuquerque and about once a month – they host adults’ nights – which is a brilliant idea. Because going to a science museum and watching kids interact with exhibits – not all that interesting. Getting to play with the exhibits yourself – ka-ching!

Explora! is near Old Town Albuquerque – so we decided to get dinner beforehand at La Crepe Michel. As you can imagine – the menu is dominated by crepes (although they do have salads and some other entrees). But we all focused on the crepes. They had a list of about 9 savory crepes – between the four of us we tried saumon et asperges, porc dijonnaise, fruit de mers, and champignons. I forgot to take pictures – but everyone enjoyed their meals. I had the fruit de mers in a buckwheat crepe (gluten free) and it was pretty good, but it didn’t knock me out of the park – it was filled with scallops and shrimp (very, very tiny shrimp) and I thought that the seafood was a bit tough.

Ah – but then we moved on to dessert. I tried the Crepes David – chocolate, nutella, vanilla ice cream and chantilly cream – really, need I say more? It was delicious:

The others with me tried pears, bananas with rum and chocolate, and strawberries (all of them had chantilly cream). Derek had the bananas with rum and chocolate and somehow snuck a bite of mine – he later reported that mine was much better than his.

On to the museum. We walked over there and had a blast checking out all of the exhibits.

Always fun to checkout a rube goldberg contraption:

They had fun displays on airflow and since at least two of us were aero majors (Derek as an astro major, doesn’t really get into the airflow thing) – we had fun here. Derek is checking out the Bernoulli flow demonstration:

And we got to fly a mini-plane – I rocked this (perhaps my previous experience flying sailplanes helped). The elevator / angle of attack worked pretty well, but the rudder was a mess. Here’s our friend Jeremy taking his turn:

Then they had an experiment bar and tonight’s experiment was Drawing Machines. They had a whole bunch of random supplies – egg cartons, stiff foam, popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, big lego blocks, rubber bands, etc. – plus mini-rotary motors and battery packs (plus hot glue to help afix things). Then you just try and build a machine that with its motion would “draw.” This was surprisingly hard – and we had to iterate several times to get ours to work. But it did indeed work (admittedly, our dude was not a very fast drawer). Here is our machine mid-way:

and then finished:

There were several cool vibrations exhibits. But – I had a blast at the bubble exhibit. Yes – this is something all kids have played with – but these bubble wands / soapy water – worked amazingly well and easily and we were able to form enormous bubbles: