things to do: OMSI

The Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is one of those legendary kid-places in Portland. It's like the Exploratorium, only more cleanly presented. The Exploratorium might have the edge in terms of interactivity, but OMSI is way cleaner and brighter, with no fear of your kid wandering off and getting turned into an exhibit.

There was an exhibit about the monster "Big Pipe" sewer project in Portland, there was something about all the scary scary nuclear and chemical waste stored in vast tanks in the desert up in the Columbia Gorge. Upstream. My cousin Mart lives up there near the Hanford Site, and she'd told me about it years ago. "There's tanks out there NOBODY knows what's in them."

We spent three hours upstairs, looking at that stuff, playing in the kid area and seeing some critters (there are Giant Hissing Cockroaches and Red-Kneed Tarantulas on view everywhere you go in Oregon), then stopped in at the Robot exhibit downstairs for another hour.

Cool stuff: actual robots under glass with videos of them working, an industrial robot that you can race against to make designs out of plastic shapes, and an interesting interactive 'flower' garden.
We bought a "jitterbot robot" kit, which is an electric motor, a chunk of foam and a piece of hot-glue-gun glue stick. You're supposed to put wires into the foam to act like 'legs', but there weren't any wires in the bag, so we taped crayons to a plastic cup and set the thing off.

It was pretty late (about 7), when we left, but we got our bikes out of the car and went for a little ride down the riverside bikeway, and down onto one of the docks. That was pretty cool; the bike loop around the river is great, and appears to be an active bike-commute corridor.