Long time readers will perhaps remember the last time we attempted to learn about whales on a trip: the disastrous whale watch near Provincetown. Everyone was still far too scarred by that experience to attempt another whale watch a mere three years later, but we do still love whales….so we decided to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a museum that’s all about…umm, killing whales.
New Bedford, MA is a little less than an hour’s drive from Normandy Farms Campground, where we were staying. We pretty much spent the week going places that were a little less than an hour away. We’d never been to New Bedford and it has an NPS site, so it was an obvious choice.
The whaling museum is part of the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, which includes several sites in the downtown area with ties to the city’s whaling past. The visitor center and most of the historic buildings that one can usually tour were still closed because of Covid when we were there, so we focused on the whaling museum. But in normal times, there are guided tours and historic houses to tour and all that sort of thing.
We were a little concerned about parking, since the museum is right in the city center, but it was easy to find metered street parking a short walk away. Tickets are $19 for adults, $9 for children and youth, and $12 for students 19 and up (I really appreciate student ticket prices, as someone who travels with officially adult but still dependent college-aged kids). The museum participates in the North American Reciprocal Museum program as well, so we were able to get in free through that.
I’d allow maybe 2-3 hours to see the museum, depending on your (or your kids’) attention span for lots of detail about whaling. This was the first museum we’d been in in quite awhile, and it was pretty exciting, because we love museums!
Some highlights for us were the stuff about whales in general:
The ginormous and impressive scrimshaw collection:
…this half-scale model of a whaling ship that you can go inside (watch your head!) that was built inside the building in 1915:
Maybe the best part of the museum was going out on the observation deck and seeing (New Bedford and) baby seagulls!
However, I can’t promise that there will be baby seagulls there when you visit.
After the museum, we spent a little time wandering around town and looking at the waterfront:
We ate at and enjoyed The Black Whale for lunch. With one kid still unable to be vaccinated, we focused on restaurants with outdoor seating this summer…but this ended up meaning a lot of restaurants right on the water, which is not a bad thing at all.
And that was it for our short New Bedford visit. We’ll have to come back when more is open (we didn’t even get a Junior Ranger badge!) but it was a fun day at a great museum.
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