Quad Cities – The Quad Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau (QCCVB) and area museums hold their second annual Quad Cities Museum Week on June 18-26, 2016. Due to the overwhelming success of last year’s event, paticipating museums and the QCCVB decided to make this an annual event for visitors and residents.
Museums from across the Quad Cities region welcome visitors for a week-long adventure of fun activities, great discoveries, exploration, and even geocaching. Information on the 18 participating museums, their events, and the geocache can be found at www.qcmuseumweek.com.
This year’s theme is museum mysteries and little known facts. Each museum will feature a mystery about something in their collection or about the building that houses the museum. The Museum Week website provides information on the mysteries that will be featured at each museum.
“From tunnel tours, the Wizard of Oz and King Tut, to amazing works of art, antique trucks, and stories about our area’s history, the experiences are going to be plentiful during Museum Week,” says Charlotte Doehler-Morrison, QCCVB vice-president of Marketing & Communications. “Enjoy this celebration of our region’s museums and participate in the special activities, exhibits and promotions that each museum has put together for the special week. It’s a great opportunity to spend a day with friends and family, and each museum features its own theme, history, galleries, and exhibits. Plus, the mysteries they highlight will add to the experience.”
Participating Museums include:
· Afro-American Heritage Center
· Augustana Teaching Museum of Art (ATMA)
· Buffalo Bill Museum
· Buffalo Bill Cody Homestead
· Butterworth Center & Deere-Wiman House
· Catich Gallery
· Colonel Davenport House
· Dan Nagle Walnut Grove Pioneer Village
· Davenport School Museum
· Family Museum
· Figge Art Museum
· German American Heritage Center
· Hauberg Indian Museum at Black Hawk State Historic Site
· Iowa 80 Trucking Museum
· Karpeles Manuscript Museum
· Palmer Family and Chiropractic History Museum
· Putnam Museum & Science Center
· Rock Island County Historical Society
Beyond all the fun exhibits and events going on during Quad Cities Museum Week, there also is a Geocache for everyone to enjoy!
Geocaching is a treasure hunt that can be as fun for the hider as it is for the seeker. Any given treasure, known as a geocache, has specific coordinates of longitude and latitude to which seekers must travel in order to locate the treasure. Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or GPS-enabled smartphone and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", anywhere in the world.
“By finding some or all of the Quad Cities Museum caches, you will learn about the many great museums in the community,” says Gretchen Small of the Butterworth Center and Deere-Wiman House. “A total of 12 museums are participating in the Geocache.”
Ms. Small organized the geocache and the project was funded by the William Butterworth Foundation. According to Ms. Small, all the museum caches are located outdoors. To get started on your treasure hunt during Quad Cities Museum Week, simply go to www.geocaching.com and see if you can collect a wooden nickel from all of the participating museum geocaches.
Participating museums in the Geocache include the Buffalo Bill Cody Homestead, Buffalo Bill Museum, Butterworth Center, Dan Nagle Walnut Grove Pioneer Village, Deere-Wiman House, Family Museum, Figge Art Museum, German American Heritage Center, Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, Putnam Museum, and Rock Island County Historical Society.
Quad Cities Museum Week was created through a collaboration between area museums and the QCCVB. The event is designed to showcase the wealth of museums in the Quad Cities region and to create greater awareness about each museum’s offerings. Last year, Museum Week generated anywhere from a 5% to 50% increase in museum attendence during the event.
For more information on the geocache and Quad Cities Museum Week, go to www.qcmuseumweek.com. 18 museums throughout the Quad Cities region are part of this year’s celebration. The website includes geocache information, museum events and listings, and a downloadable brochure. The brochure is printable and lists all the events, museum locations, and a map.
Museums and the QCCVB encourage people to post about their Museum Week experiences on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram by using the hashtag #QCMUSEUMWEEK.
