Living Our Dream: Creation Museum

We are baby boomers who have been privileged to enjoy our dream of early retirement while traveling full-time. After 10 years, we traded our 2005 37' Allegro Bay for a 2015 DRV Tradition fifth wheel being towed by a 2015 Silverado 3500HD Duramax dually. After another couple of years full-timing, we 'hung up the keys' last spring when we traded the fifth wheel and truck for a park model and a car. We now live in Wauchula, Florida in the middle of orange groves and cattle ranches...what many call 'the real Florida.' We are not blogging as often, but we are still exploring our new home state and sharing our discoveries.. Our heartfelt thanks to our soldiers and their families for their sacrifices that have ensured our freedom to live our dream.

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August 13, 2012

Creation Museum

Rising Sun, IN - Events of Monday, August 6 to Thursday, August 9, 2012

We took our time leaving Still Waters Campground in Frankfort, because we only had about a 90-minute drive to our next stop. We pulled into Little Farm on the River RV Resort around noon. Little Farm on the River RV Resort is located on the Ohio River in Rising Sun, IN just to the southwest of Cincinnati. Rising Sun has mostly full hookup sites, although there are a few sites with water and electric only. There is free Wi-Fi that was fairly fast and reliable.

There are two camping areas - one about half way between the state highway and the Ohio River, and one about ¼ mile away on the banks of the river. Both sections have pull-throughs down the middle and back-ins along the edges. Some people like the riverside sites for the view, and some like the other sites because they are closer to the swimming pool and to the all the planned activities they have on the weekends.

The roads at Little Farm are dusty gravel. The pads are gravel, and the grassy sites are fairly widely spaced.

Our back-in site at Little Farm RV

Sites are $40 a night Thursday through Saturday and $33 during the week. There is also a 50% Passport America discount during the week, so the average cost for our stay of four nights was a little over $21 a night. They also offer a 10% Good Sam discount.

The campground was quiet when we were there in the middle of the week, but as we said, there are a lot of planned activities on the weekends and a lot of seasonals, so it could be zooy. Most of the trailers in the photo below looked like they belonged to seasonals.

Many seasonals at Little Farm RV

We had a site that backed up to the river; but unfortunately, there is a row of trees and dense underbrush along the bank, so we didn't have a clear view of the water. However, we still managed to see several tow boats with barges going up and down. This seems to be our year for rivers and barges.

Towboat and barges on the Ohio River behind our site

The reason we stopped in Rising Sun was to visit the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. Petersburg is located in a little finger of Kentucky that is wedged in between the southeastern corner of Indiana and the southwestern corner of Ohio. It was across the Ohio River and a little to the north of where we were staying. We headed there on Tuesday morning.

Entrance to the Creation Museum

Creationism is the belief that the earth, mankind, and all the universe were created by God rather than occurring through random events and evolution. Creationism takes many forms from a strict interpretation of the Bible and a literal 6-day creation to Intelligent Design where God directed the process of natural selection. There are also many variations in between, but those who believe in creation share one basic idea - that life, even simple, single-cell organisms, is much too complicated to have occurred by chance. Attempts to explain the origin of the universe apart from the existence of a supreme being by means of something like the Big Bang Theory have one glaring problem - where did the matter and/or energy that was used to create the universe come from in the first place?

We arrived at the museum shortly after 10:00 AM. We had to wait in line about 10 minutes to get our tickets, then the line to get into the museum itself was just about as long. There is a $5 discount off the adult admission price on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and we were there on a Tuesday so the crowd was fairly large. Seniors and AAA members get a $5 discount every day. There were no lines when we left, so we recommend going around noon if you go on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

The Creation Museum also has an outdoor botanical garden, so we decided to see that first before the temperature got too hot and with the hope some of the crowd inside would dissipate later on. We headed across the floating bridge into the garden.

Floating bridge to the garden

After climbing a small rise on the other side of the bridge, we were greeted by a sea of flowers.

Flowers on the far side of the bridge

There was a koi pond with a waterfall, and the pond was surrounded by a Japanese garden. The waterfall looked a lot bigger and more powerful than it was thanks to a mist-generating nozzle at its base.

Waterfall in the Japanese garden

Koi pond

Another view of the koi pond

Next, we entered the tropical garden with its abundance of banana trees.

Banana trees in the tropical garden

Margery in the tropical garden

Deer statue in the botanical garden

Paul and Margery in the botanical garden

Margery with pink petunias and lime-green ornamental sweet potato vine

Cattails at the lake in the botanical garden

The Creation Museum also has several shows, some of which are included in the price of admission, and some of which are extra cost. One of the included shows is "Men in White," which is a multi-media presentation that tells the Biblical story of creation in a special-effects theater. There are flashing lights, wind, rain and seats that vibrate in conjunction with some of the loud, rumbling sounds. We were finished with the gardens at just about the right time to see the 11:15 showing of "Men in White," so we went into the museum and made our way to the theater. The special effects were a lot of fun and were on a par with anything Disney could do.

There is also a planetarium with several extra-cost shows and there was an extra-cost musical that featured live animals. We skipped the extra-cost shows and headed into the museum itself after seeing "Men in White".

Main hall at the museum entrance

The fossil record is important to the study of how the earth came to be, and the Creation Museum had many examples on display.

Sea urchin fossils

Display showing paleontologists uncovering a dinosaur fossil

Of course, dinosaurs are very popular with the kids, and the Creation Museum has plenty of them on display. The one shown below was an animatronic version that moved and roared, and there was even a special balcony that featured nothing but dinosaurs.

Animatronic dinosaur

The main part of the exhibit features a Walk Through Biblical History.

Adam naming the animals

Creationism as presented by the Creation Museum follows the Young Earth Theory, which says the earth is only thousands of years old, not billions. The museum presents credible theories to explain the discrepancy in estimated age that include explaining the flaws of radiometric dating. It's all very technical, but radioactive material decays over time, and radiometric dating basically measures the amount of radioactive material remaining in a sample to determine its age. The problem is we're not 100% sure how much radioactive material was there at the start, so calculating the percentage that is left requires a lot of assumptions.

Noah's flood also helps explain age discrepancies. For example, one may look at a canyon with a stream flowing at the bottom and say, "Wow! That little stream must have taken eons to carve that big canyon." However, if we consider relatively deep canyons were carved in a matter of days by melt water from glaciers following the eruption of Mount St. Helens, we can see large quantities of water from the Great Flood could carve huge canyons in a relatively short period of time.

As expected, there was a section of the museum devoted to Noah. A model of the cross section of the ark is shown below.

Model of the interior decks of Noah's ark