This morning on Day 5 of the Good Morning Quad Cities Road Trip, we traveled to Dubuque, Iowa and visited the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium.
The museum was established in 2003 on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown Dubuque and has several buildings on six acres of land. Wendy Scardino, the museum's Communications Director, gave us a tour of the da Vinci exhibit that is open to the public through October. It is massive in scope and includes a real life-size replica of da Vinci's most iconic "Last Supper" painting. And many of da Vinci's ideas are aquatic in nature, which makes it a perfect fit for the National Museum.
That exhibit is just part of the experience. The museum and aquarium centers around the entire Mississippi River basin from the Gulf of Mexico, all the way to its source in Minnesota. Visitors can explore many aquatic exhibits, seeing all kinds of fish, turtles, starfish, and octopus. On Good Morning Quad Cities, we hung out with "Mama," the alligator. We even got a good splash from the stingrays! Visitors can pet the stingrays anytime, but feeding time just happened to coincide with our live shot this morning.
An entirely new exhibit is under construction with an open-date scheduled for 2019. Stay tuned for more info! And wouldn't that be great timing for next year's GMQC Road Trip?
-Meteorologist Eric Sorensen
