rollercoasterfan1984
Aug 2022
This museum ended up being a favorite of our trip. Even though everyone already knows the story of the Titanic, this museum puts a new spin on it. It starts with receiving your "boarding passes" when you arrive, which provide you with the name and background of an actual Titanic passenger. Even kids get one for a child passenger. Everyone age 5 and over also get an audio tour device (looks like a tv remote with a speaker and lanyard to hang around your neck). There is a youth audio tour that the kids do as the adults do the adult audio tour, which really kept our 7 year old engaged. He loved looking for the next audio tour numbers and the answers to the questions on his boarding pass. The audio tour included stories told by actual Titanic survivors, many of whom were children at the time of the sinking. He also enjoyed the kid height question stops, where you spun one of three answer wheels to see if you knew the correct answer.
The first floor is full of actual artifacts from the ship, and understandably, no photos are allowed in the first floor because of this. Then you come to their full scale replica of the grand staircase, which is just breathtaking and a great photo stop. The second floor is a lot more hands on and gives you a great idea of what life was like aboard the Titanic. Our son loved getting a chance to spin the ship's wheel in the recreated bridge, stand on the deck at different degrees of tilt while it sank, and feel how cold the night air and water would have been that fateful night. There was also a kids only area where he got to do a simulation where he was steering the ship and had to try and avoid hitting the ice berg. The giant Lego model of the ship was also a favorite of his and impressive even for adults, especially since it was built by an 11 year old! At the end of the tour, you find out if your passenger on your boarding pass lived or died and got a good idea of how different the voyage was for first class passengers (who had a high survival rate) versus third class passengers and crew who had frighteningly low survival rates. We ended up spending several hours here, which made it well worth the cost of admission.