There’s lots of Hollywood blockbuster movies I just never bothered to see. I never saw Star Wars, I’ve heard Bill Murray sing the theme song to that film and know that it can’t be any better than that, so why bother? And I never saw Titanic. I mean we all know the ending already, right?

Well, The Peoria Riverfront Museum has a new interactive exhibition called: “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition,” and opposed to the movie, that does intrigue me. I wonder what kind of stuff was found after that huge ship sunk worse than my mood did last week? Well, we’ll soon find out as we head to beautiful downtown Peoria to the Riverfront Museum and check out this brand new exhibition!

Here we are at the Peoria Riverfront Museum on Washington Street. I climbed the stairs and once I was inside saw a couple of familiar faces, That’s Ann Schmitt and Cathie Neumiller who work here at the museum and they offered to show me take me through the Titanic exhibit. How nice is that? Of course I wasn’t about to turn them down, so let’s begin the tour!

The tour starts right here at the front counter where you get your very own boarding pass to the Titanic! That’s Karl, who we met when we were last here and had lunch in the museum. This is great because your boarding pass has the name and what class your passenger traveled in. And at the end, you get to see if your passenger lived or died. I love this! My passenger was William Arthur Lobb and he was traveling with his wife, Cordella. They were in third class and his age was 30. There’s even more information and this is really a cool way to start the tour of the exhibit! As I said, at the end, we’ll see if he made it or not! Cathie took a picture as Ann and I posed behind the passenger cutout and what’s funny is that the coat actually looks like my winter coat! It also looks like I’m grabbing Ann in an inappropriate place, but hey, I didn’t build this thing! Okay, time to board the Titanic!

There’s Ann leading the way in, Cathie hates having her picture taken, so she’ll be hiding for the rest of the tour! Speaking of pictures, as soon as you enter you get your picture taken in front of a green screen and after the tour you can pick a Titanic backdrop in the gift shop if you so desire. That’s LIse who took my photo, and so in true MBIP dueling cameras fashion, I took hers too! And now the tour begins!

I always feel bad going through exhibits in here, because I can never do them justice, but I’ll try my best! As you enter there’s lots of photos and interactive materials about and from the Titanic. One thing I didn’t know is that there were close to 3,000 bags of mail on the ship which amounted to roughly six million letters that perished when the ship went down. Ann pointed out the plans of the ship and the different areas for the three classes on board.

There’s archival photos of the Titanic being built and shots of it taking off in the exhibit along with artifacts from the construction of the vessel.

I found this really interesting, it’s menus from meals that all three different classes got to choose from and the different place settings in each class. It’s amazing that they were able to retrieve and preserve dishes from the Titanic.

These are two examples of cabins on the Titanic. The top is the first class and the second photo is from third class, where our passenger, William Lobb slept. There’s also artifacts and information from the rooms on the ship.

There’s lots of stuff I didn’t get photos of or they didn’t turn out, so remember that you should really go through for the full effect, but it is really exciting to travel through the whole thing. Here we are at the point when the Titanic was nearing the iceberg. There’s an interactive iceberg in the exhibit and you can go up and touch it. Ann and I had a contest to see who could keep their hand on the longest and I won! So we get to continue the tour!

There’s a rendering done of The Titanic going down and newspaper boys peddling papers with the headline on them. Today it would’ve been all over facecrack and Twitter with people adding their own, “WTF” replies and making Titanic memes.

The exhibit not only gives you the feeling of being on the Titanic but there’s also a whole treasure-trove of actual artifacts taken from the ship. This is just a small sampling and every artifact has information about it. Really interesting to see and read.

As you near the end of the exhibit, there’s quotes from passengers who are realizing that the ship is going down and this leads to the Memorial Room at the end of the exhibit.

This is the Memorial Room and I love the way it’s lit in here. Ann and Cathie showed me something really cool in here, this glass case contains the remnants of materials found in a suitcase and one of them is a Valentine’s Day postcard sent from Peoria! They should try and see if there’s any of this person’s relatives still in the area!

Here’s the Memorial Room’s wall that lists who was saved and who wasn’t. Our passenger, William Lobb didn’t make it. Sorry, William, but your memory lives on here and now at MBIP World Headquarters, where I’m going to put my Titanic boarding pass on the wall. So you've got that going for you in the afterlife!

Meanwhile, back at the gift shop in the museum, there’s a whole line of Titanic china you can purchase along with lots of books on the exhibit and the Titanic itself. And you can redeem your photo here and here’s Paola and Ann presenting me with mine! They chose the Titanic entrance for my backdrop and it’s really cool! The Titanic exhibition will be on display until March 12, 2017 at the Peoria Riverfront Museum. This Saturday (November 19) is Titanic Family Day and you can read all about that right here. Thanks so much to Ann and Cathie for the tour and to everyone at the Peoria Riverfront Museum for a fun afternoon! I had a blast! We’ll see you all tomorrow!

The Peoria Riverfront Museum
200-248 SW Washington Street
Peoria
309-686-7000
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It was sad when that great ship went down...

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