Today we finally went to the museum at the Big Nickel here in Sudbury with the kids. We have a membership to science north which also gives us access to this place be we have never actually checked it out in the last couple years.

The nickel is kinda cool since it's a giant coin, but you get pretty used to it passing it every day on my way to town for the last 20 years, it looses it's excitement.

Even the kids aren't that impressed by it, but of course last week when the in-laws were in town we had to go check it out. That was when we spotted this little addition!

It's a big outdoor playground will all kinds on machines and mining equipment you can play on and the biggest coolest sandbox in the city! So we had to check it out.

Well as it turns out the museum is pretty cool! Unfortunately the coolness prevented me from remembering to take too many photos, so I don't have too much to share from inside.

Upstairs there are a lot of rock and mineral samples which are pretty interesting, and they discuss a few times about the metals used in coinage and have quite a little coin collection from all over the world as well. My son's favorite was the actually meteorite they have on display. It's not massive, but a good softball size. He's been really into space and meteorites recently so it was pretty cool.

Then we went to the basement and it's actually a pretty cool little kids zone. They got to dress up as miners and there was all these stages of moving these foam ore chunks around with carts and chutes and conveyor belts.

There was a few simulators when the kids could drive excavators and some other mining equipment, there was a panning for gold area which kept me distracted for a while. And of course you can also take a trip underground into a old mine shaft, but the kids were still a bit too small for that part, but maybe in a few years.

This place is definitely going in the rotation of things to do on a regular basis in town!