With my family in town for the 4th of July, we’ve been going around hitting all the “vacation spots” in the area.  We’ve gone whale watching (saw some wonderful Orca whales up north), visited Snoqualmie Falls, the Boeing Museum of Flight, and other attractions.  On Sunday we got the bright idea of heading down to Tacoma and checking out the Museum of Glass.  What a mistake.

For some reason, the city of Tacoma has an oder that just can’t be ignored.  It seems to go away nicely when you’re inside a building, but anytime you’re out in open air you’ll notice the smell.  However, if the attractions in the town were great enough, I wouldn’t let this bother me.  For some reason though, last weekend was not a good weekend to be at the Museum of Glass.

From what I’ve read and seen online, the place is supposed to be spectacular.  Great examples of cast, sculpted, and blown glass were suppose to abound.  However, for some reason this was not the case this weekend.  I think it shows that you really need to check what exhibits are going on at the museum, and not just assume they will be glass-related.  At the time we visited, there was only one glass-related exhibit (of 3 total exhibits).

The result was that I saw more glass in the parking lot that I did inside the museum.  The hot shop was pretty cool (hot shop = where they make and blow glass), but having actually done this before, it wasn’t that exciting to me.  After checking out the hot shop, we looked around the museum’s galleries, to much disappointment.  The hallway to the bathroom featured more glass art than all of the galleries put together.  Additionally, there was more glass outside than in, with the towers of Chihuly’s blue glass towers on the bridge behind the museum. 

Unfortunately, that was it.  There were no great glass art pieces around the grounds of the museum, nor inside.  Totally disappointing.  At least I got to see the towers on the bridge.  Next time, unless I see ahead of time a good exhibit going on, I’m going to skip the entry fee for the museum and just check out the gift shop and the museum grounds.