There's nothing like driving for hours with 3 small children trapped in carseats and then having to entertain them for a day in a strange town by myself to bring out the urban explorer in me. Well, if by "explore" you mean "walk 5 blocks with kids, stroller, and diaper bag." After waving my husband off to work I hustled our 5, 3 and almost-2-year-old kids out of our uptown Charlotte hotel and down Tryon Street to Discovery Place, a wonderland of science. (Bonus points if you can enunciate it like Thomas Dolby: "SCIENCE!")

After taming one meltdown over expensive butterfly t-shirts (why do children's museums insist on making you enter via the gift shop?), we took the elevator to the bottom floor, which caters to younger kids. The museum offers what I think of as "quiet science" -- gazing at  saltwater aquatic life in the aquarium, petting a friendly land tortoise outside the rain forest exhibit -- next to more active exhibits, which involved looking at slides under microscopes, turning cranks to create electric current that moved a toy train, and more. (My two-year-old squeezed his hand under a 2-inch gap to pick up the gravel on which a stuffed polar bear was standing and throw it, but this would probably fall only under the science of parental failure.)

But we hungered for bigger things, so we trekked back up to the main level, where older kids were burning off a lot of kinetic energy at exhibits that seemed to fall under the heading of "fun physics," like pulling weights that dropped and blew air that forced a tennis ball to shoot 3 stories high and bounce back down. To say that most of the exhibits could be summed up as "push this, watch this move" doesn't describe just how fun they all were. Kids helped pull each other up toggle ropes while sitting. Others toiled at a gear shaft that started an entire complex mechanism going. Who knew work could be so entertaining?

We took a break in the downstairs cafe, where an abundance of organic snacks awaited, surrounded by a cozy phalanx of large and small rocking chairs. Then we found the holy grail: the water room. Part of the room offers stations that allow kids to build with large blocks, or put on superhero capes and stand in front of a large fan, but who are we kidding? It was the area with a massive water table and a zillion faucets that everyone flocked to. Little kids filled water cups and emptied them into funnels. Bigger kids tried to fill up water towers with leaky holes at the bottom. One boy managed to twist water back and forth to soak a bevy of girls with flowerpots.

Drenched, we caught the free trolley back to the hotel. An elderly rider held my soaking wet toddler on her lap as I wrestled my stroller up the steep trolley steps. Two others chatted my girls up as we rode "the train" (really just a trolley-shaped bus) back to the civilization of naptime and fresh towels. It was a perfect outing... although I'm still fending off questions about those butterfly shirts.

Discovery Place, Charlotte NC

301 North Tryon Street

Charlotte, NC 28202-2138

(704) 372-6261Open Daily 10:30am-7:30pm

http://www.discoveryplace.org/