Day 10: The Sixth Floor Museum

Today brings a first visit to a museum which is the first museum that we visit in this trip. The museum in the question is The Sixth Floor museum which documents JFK's assassination. I was excited for the trip; we drove to the museum, finding a car park was difficult because we had to drive through the city.

It was bit surreal as it was first city that we have visited in few days as we had spent past few days driving through remote wildness after Las Vegas. It was very metropolitan yet small which we found out when we finally found a car park about 15 minutes' walk outside of the city. At the car park, we could see the entire city with highways surrounding it.

We all scrambled out and started our walk where we had a hilarious encounter with a cool black dude because we all got bit lost so Stuart got his phone out which has the address of the museum on but the black dude thought Stuart wanted to take a photo of him so he started to throw several of gangster poses which made Stuart very bemused and had us all in stitches! Eventually the black dude understood what Stuart really wanted and gave us all directions while laughing off the misunderstanding without being embarrassed which was good of him.

We arrived at the museum; we unknowingly walked past the very spot where JFK was shot in Grassy Knoll. I even saw an incredible untasteful graffiti on the route which said bang bang. The museum was called sixth floor museum because that is the very floor where Harvey Lee Oswald shot JFK.

The museum was interesting, I learnt a lot about JFK himself such as the fact he only got in politics because his father pushed him to after the death of his first-born son or that he was a supporter of civil rights movement which is one of possible links to his demise.

The second half of the museum charts JFK's death and the aftermath such as evidence from police investigations and Johnson's swearing in as the new president. There were excellent reconstructions including the arranged boxes that Lee used to sit on and support his sniper rifle as he aimed at JFK. There was a building model of the museum which used be a bookshop and surrounding buildings including a line which showed the direction the bullet travelled towards JFK. From the museum, we realised that we saw a white cross on the road as we walked past was the exact spot where JFK was killed. Once we had our fill, we left the museum for the longest drive in this trip to New Orleans.