Poth Diaries:: Vacation Part I - Creation Museum & The Ark Encounter

For our family vacation this year, we decided to head up to Kentucky to see the Creation Museum & the Ark Encounter. It's been something we'd like to see for a few years and the kids were all at great ages to really understand and enjoy them both!

We were able to fly (thanks to Lex having plenty of airline points), so we flew into the Cincinnati airport early (my alarm woke me up at 2:30 am!), but everyone got up happy and excited for the adventure!

We landed, hopped in our rental car, and headed straight to the Creation Museum, which was only about 15 minutes away.

The grounds around the museum were beautifully landscaped!

We headed inside without a plan at all, just went around to the exhibits that seemed interesting....Dinosaurs, Wonderfully Made, & Insects. We also went to two 4D movies about creation. Luckily we got the 3 Day Bouncer pass, so we didn't have to rush through, instead we came back the next morning to finish what we missed.

Did you know that Dinosaurs actually were created when all other animals were created - 6,000 years ago? We didn't! In school you're taught they are 65 million years old, we'll if you believe the bible is 100% true, then that can't be right. They've done carbon data research that disproves this secular theory. For instance, consider a Volcano that erupted 40 years ago, using carbon dating it states that same volcanic material is 500K-600K years old. Crazy Right!? With that said, humans must have lived with the dinosaurs, which wasn't a problem because no animals ate any meat until after Noah's Ark was back on land after the flood!

We learned so many cool things, I took pictures of a lot so I would be able to read back on it one day. Although, you'll have to zoom in to read them!

After our first afternoon at the Creation Museum, we stayed at a nearby hotel in Indiana.....so now the kids can add Michigan (airport), Kentucky, Ohio & Indiana to the states they have visited, all in one day, LOL!

Katelyn had to get a run in, so we all played around in the hotel gym while she ran.

Our hotel was on the Ohio River.

We went back to the Creation Museum the next morning and actually started at the beginning and walked our way through the 7 days of Creation. It was a lot of reading, some videos, the Garden of Eden, and some big reality checks! The kids read everything too, it was great!

In the Garden with Adam & Eve....and the dinosaurs!

They had another display on dragons and their mythology and Kyler loves a good book about dragons!

The grounds were really pretty!! We enjoyed walking around the lake, feeding the fish, & checking out a few animals in the zoo.

Around lunch time, we left and hit the road to the Ark Encounter. It is located about 45 minutes south of the Creation Museum and with our bouncer pass we had access to both museums over a 3 day period. We decided to see what we could at the Ark and then finish what we missed the next morning before heading to Pigeon Forge.

Our rental car had a regular outlet, so Lex tried to make a cup of coffee with his Keurig before hitting up the Ark! LOL, he was so excited it had power....but not quite enough to make a cup of coffee, but he survived!

When you arrive, you park in a large parking lot and then they bus you out to where the Ark is. At the entrance is this rainbow you get to walk through! Reclaim the Rainbow!!

And there it is! Pictures don't do it justice!

You enter from underneath, and there are rows and rows of roped off areas for the line to weave around under the Ark. When we got there it was empty!! We really lucked out, apparently the line is longest in the morning.

Inside they have done their best to guess how the animals all fit. They've estimated how many different animal groups were on the ship, what type of systems Noah had to build to help manage the amount of food necessary to feed all the animals and his family, how they kept up with all the poop even, water collection systems, where and how Noah and his family lived, etc. etc. It was so cool to try to imagine what he had to do to make this happen. All while being mocked by everyone, saying he was crazy for thinking the world was going to flood!

They had a video that looped every 30 minutes or so on each level of the ship (there were 3, I believe), so we sat at watched the video, then toured the next level and then the video on the level above that, continued the story. The created did a great job helping you visualize what Noah had to go through. And he was old! I believe it took him 80 years to build it too!

The door the animals would have traveled through, was about this size!

Growing their food....

This was a modern day comic style exhibit that spanned quite a way around the top deck about a teen that didn't believe in God and her friend convinces her God was real. It was meant to give you a way to talk to others that don't believe and proving to them that He does! Kids loved this too, maybe they'll be able to use this one day on someone they meet.

We can't let a photo op, pass us up :)

We ate dinner on site at the Ark, they had a nice buffet restaurant and what is a vacation without at least one buffet?!? :)

We stayed in an Air BNB that night about 10 minutes away, cutest little house and much to our surprise had a nice park with a lake and walking trail behind it. The kids played tag before getting ready for bed and then the next morning Lex and Katelyn went for a run before we headed back to the Ark for our final day.

Since we had already seen everything inside the Ark, all we really had left to do was explore the outdoors. They had a bigger zoo than the creation museum, so we took our time checking out some of the unique animals. They even had camel rides starting at noon, but we didn't hang around that long, but we totally would have let the kids ride a camel if the timing had worked out.