Fun of Titanic Proportions

Last weekend a neighbor of ours gave us passes to see “Titanic – Treasures from the Deep”. It was a really neat traveling museum with actual items from the Titanic. I am really glad she dropped the passes off for us for a couple of reasons. First, we wouldn’t have known about it otherwise. And second, and more importantly she gave us a VIP pass.

So instead of waiting in this line:

It was really, really long. A lady in the exhibit said she had waited in line for 3 hours. There was no way we would have done that.

With the pass we waited in this line instead:

It was still pretty warm and the kids weren’t feeling very well, but we didn’t let that stop us. Well it almost stopped Roo, but she hung on.

As you get ready to enter you are given a ticket with the name and brief description of an actual Titanic passenger.

Here is Ham with his ticket.

While waiting in line there was a little bit of this, but not too bad:

Inside there were quite a few artifacts, but it was more emotional than I expected it to be. The beginning talked about what an amazing ship it was and all the details. Then it started to introduce you to some of the passengers. The famous ones like ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown’ and those that ended up on the Titanic because it was more accommodating for children. There was a family that chose to sail on the Titanic because it allowed children in the dining room, when not all of the other luxury cruise ships at that time did.

Then at the end there was the passenger list. Broken down by 1st, 2nd and 3rd class passengers. And further broken down by who survived and who didn’t. My ticket was for a young mother traveling in 3rd class with her two very young children, all three of them died when the ship sank. They didn’t even make it to the life boats. I can’t even image what that poor young mother went through that night.

Of the seven passengers we represented only Roo’s passenger survived. She was a young mother traveling alone with a young son. When she got up on deck to the lifeboats someone snatched her son out of her arms and tossed him aboard a different life boat. She was picked up by the Carpathia. A few days later she was walking on deck and recognized her baby in the arms of another lady – who refused to return the child to her, claiming he was her child. So this young mother went to the Captain and begged him to intercede and return the child to her. She was able to describe a birthmark on the baby and the Captain reunited them. Can you imagine?

This little family means the world to me and I am glad we made it through the Titanic and we all survived. Well Roo did throw up, but other than that we were fine.

Here we are in front of the Grand Staircase.

Okay not really.