"You sunk a $700,000 yacht?" - Michael Bluth, Arrested Development

Titanic. The Exhibition. I’m sure that this museum exhibit will be as reliably fun as a voyage on the Titanic.

I blame The Boy. The Mrs. and I put the question to him. Do you want to go to the Leonardo DaVinci Exhibit at the Natural History Museum, or go see the Titanic Exhibition at the Moody Gardens? (I was secretly rooting for the DaVinci stuff, since maybe I could crib some of his really cool designs and make a crank-powered flying computer that had the Mona Lisa on the side.)

He picked The Titanic.

We set off in typical Wilder-herd-of-turtles fashion at about 1PM. It takes about that long to caffeinate us all on a Saturday morning. An early Saturday morning trip? Oh, 11AM is pushing it for us.

We drove down to Galveston. I had taken a cursory look on Google Maps™ at the location of Moody Gardens, and guessed at the route. I thought (like the captain of the Titanic) that I could take a shortcut, with similar results. Twenty minutes later, we stopped at a grocery store to ask directions. If you’ve ever been to Galveston, you know you can drive almost all of the streets in about ten minutes, so I had probably been on several streets more than once. Oops.

We finally arrived at Moody Gardens. Moody Gardens consists of big, pyramid-shaped buildings, perhaps constructed that way to concentrate the forces of harmonic goodness so that Madonna© can sell albums. Heck, I don’t know. They’re pyramids, and we were there.

Feel the nice pyramid goodness, complete with a creamy nougat center.

We found the appropriate pyramid with Titanic: The Exhibition®. I bought the tickets ($34?), and was greeted with a sign at the entry to the exhibit that indicated no photos, videos, camcorders, or memories were allowed without the express written consent of the NFL™ and the Oakland Raiders©, unless you were a member of the New England Patriots® coaching staff. I guess they get to video anywhere. I was disappointed, since I had wanted to treat the visitors of Wilder By Far to an actual video of the exhibit.

We got into the line of people and slowly shuffled near recreations of various staterooms, glass cases that had old stuff scraped from the bottom of the ocean. Me? I had seen all this junk in my great-grandparent’s garage, except they didn’t spend millions of dollars dredging it off of the ocean floor. They were just packrats that saved aluminum foil. So, since I can’t show you pictures to indicate how dismal and depressing I thought the exhibit was, I briefly considered taking a video of the junk in my garage and posting it to Youtube©, and indicating that these were treasures made of atoms created in a nuclear fusion furnace and expelled by an actual supernova.

The Boy is considerably less jaded than I. He’s bee reading about the Titanic, and was relatively amazed. He would have love great-grandpa’s garage, too. (I did when I was seven.) The only thing he did that irritated me was when he wanted to stop and watch a Discovery Channel® video that was playing and part of the exhibition. I dragged him away.

“We can watch TV at home.” Plus, we could leave faster.

The Mrs. enjoyed the exhibit as well, despite the fact that the nearly-three (and nearly forty pound) Pugsley had attached himself to her like a baby koala, and I could hear The Mrs. vertebra (vertebra are back bones, and not really bras at all) compacting under his sluggish weight.

We left. We stopped off at the beach in Galveston (free), kicked off our shoes and waded in the surf.

We had more fun at the beach, and could even take pictures.