Today we went to the O. Winston Link Museum, the Virginia Museum of Transportation, and Valley View mall. Very good, enh, and enh, respectively.
The Link Museum focuses on the photography of just this one person, Winston Link, who spent years photographing the steam trains in western Virginia, which were the last in use in the country. They had really cool labels, making clever, stylish, evocative use of the graphic design of the trains and the converted train station in which the museum is housed. The half-hour video about the photgrapher and his projects was good too - initially I thought "half an hour is too long for an orientation film," but it did a lot to tell you why these pictures were worth looking at. However, I will say that two hours of train photos was enough for me. I think it helps to know the area or to like trains a lot.
The other museum was okay. I had found a dollar bill outside on the ground and as I put it in the donation box I desparately wished I had more to give them - trains and planes and automobiles have got to be a maze of conservation problems, and many of their pieces were just outside under the open sky. They really lacked labels all over the whole museum - and I don't really know why, because you know there are dozens of train nuts volunteering there, and if you could just get them to talk for 10 minutes about each thing, transcribe their convesration, pick out the best bits, do a bit of layout, print, laminate, and stick it on the wall, that would be a good start. Not my usual philosophy of label-writing and design, but poorly organized information is better than none.
The mall was a waste of time. I hadn't realized that Roanoke is only about the same size of Peoria, so the mall is nothing special. I had remembered this place as uber-cool when we visited Virginia in junior high and high school - of course, I lived in Macomb then and had to drive 90 minutes to get to any mall.
Tomorrow I have been promised a trip to "the cabin," my parents' mysterious little river-front house. I might get to drive the riding lawn mower!
