with all further ado: the group colonoscopy

     Okay, so we didn't actually all go and get colonoscopies. Yesterday morning, my mom and Aunt Jayne told me we were going somewhere fun later in the day... but they wouldn't tell me where. When I asked, Aunt Jayne responded, "Well, we didn't want to tell you all at once, but we're all going to get colonoscopies." Gotta love Aunt Jayne! So we drove over to Keelin's (if you don't know this by now, she's my nine-year-old cousin) and picked her up. The whole way we speculated over where we were going. Finally Keelin decided we were going to Chipotle, and I thought we were going to the zoo. We stopped and ate a hurried lunch at Hy-Vee and then got back in the car and kept driving. We crossed the bridge, and passed the ballpark, and climbed up the hill. Now we couldn't be going to the zoo, so we were puzzled.
     We finally entered the parking lot of the Putnam Museum... and I looked out my window to see a huge poster of the Titanic draped across one side of the building!!! Now, if you don't know me, I AM OBSESSED WITH THE TITANIC. Not only the movie, but the actual RMS Titanic, and the people, and the fictional Rose and Jack and all things Titanic. So this was a dream come true! There was the poster for James Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" which was also awesome because I am obsessed with James Cameron and I have wanted to see the film for a long time. Anyway, it was sooooo cool!
     When we went in, they had cloths draped down of the balconies of the museum, and they'd created a Titanic with one of the balconies, paint, wood, and cloth. Then we went to get our tickets, and went up to the exhibit. To go in, you had to get a boarding pass—they looked so real! They had the White Star Line seal and R.M.S. TITANIC on the bottom. On the back, it's like a real boarding pass too: only instead of my name, it says Mrs. Edward Beane (Ethel Clarke) and has my story (I was one of more than twenty newlywed couples on board.)
     Inside the exhibit they had all sorts of fascinating artifacts, stories, and facts. There was a pair of white men's gloves in remarkably good shape for having spent the past 80 years two miles under the North Atlantic. They had never been worn and were still attached at the cuffs. There was a recreation of a first-class passenger's cabin and a third class... unfortunately for me, as I was second class, there was no display for a second-class cabin... but still, I can imagine what it would have been like! Not as fancy as first class I'm sure, but still! There was a screen in one of the rooms that showed the bots actually bringing up the very things we were looking at from the wreck.
   One of the coolest parts was the plates. If you google images from the actual wreck, one of the things that comes up is row after row of perfectly preserved, intact saucers. I have looked at pictures of those things for so long just wishing I could actually see them! Right above them was the picture, and then there they were, the very same plates, above ground and right in front of me! It was overwhelming!
   There were also some perfume bottles from the Titanic, that even after all those years underwater, still had their scent. It was amazing! In another room, they had a list of people who lived and who were lost. Fortunately, everyone in our party lived. Keelin turned out to be the oldest (not last living, oldest) survivor, and my mom was a first-class French lady whose husband gave her his whiskey flask as she was being taken away in a lifeboat, never to see him again, and she berated him for his drinking as a last farewell. After the exhibit, we saw Ghosts of the Abyss in the iMax theater at the museum. It was sooooo cool! James Cameron is so darn awesome. I'm going to meet him some day.
     Anyway, following the movie, we went to the gift shop for souvenirs. I wanted everything Titanic. I really, really, really wanted a t-shirt with the Titanic and the name of the exhibit thing, but it was too much money. My next choice was a plate with the White Star Line emblem on it—they had first, second and third class. That was also not allowed, though. My next choice would have been the DVD for Ghosts of the Abyss, if I hadn't spied out the corner of my eye the Heart of the Ocean necklace worn by Rose in the movie Titanic. I have wanted that thing for so long... It's blue and heart-shaped, if you haven't seen the movie, and even though mine is not the crown jewels of some king, it's still really pretty! I want to go back again!

So, as it says in the movie...

Are you ready to go back to Titanic?