My Trip to Kentucky...Day 4

Sunday October 15th 2017

 

                Sunday morning we woke up and once again had to be ready to leave at 9:00 AM, this time with all of our stuff packed up so we could check out of the hotel. We loaded everything into the vans and headed to church. The interpreter found a church which had Deaf Sunday school about 30 min from the hotel and not too incredibly far from the Ark Encounter. When we arrived she looked at me and told me I would be interpreting Sunday School, and she meant it, kind of.


We did team interpreting, which means she interpreted part (most) of Sunday School while I watched and cued her in on details she had missed while holding the Bible open the passage we were studying to help get anything we weren’t. After a while we would switch and I would interpret with her cuing me in (and my friends in the back row cuing me in). We also had one of the other CODA’s sitting with us to catch all of the fingerspelling (using handshapes to spell words out, used for proper nouns and words with no sign equivalent) and numbers because those can be hard understand a lot of the time. After the teacher finished we were able to interact with the Deaf there for a few minutes before we had to leave which we all enjoyed. Then we all piled back into the vans and went to the Ark Encounter.

                When we arrived at the Ark Encounter we could not believe the lines. Because it was Sunday and the Ark is run by a Christian organization they do not open until noon so everyone was trying to get in all at once. Two of our party members got in line and bought tickets, which took FOR…..EV…………………………………………ER! The rest of us stood in a group near the back of the ticket area which confused a lot of people who could not figure out if we were in line or not. when the tickets were finally bought we lucked out because two of our party members had wheelchairs which meant we were able to get on one of the wheelchair accessible buses and avoided the lines to get on the regular buses. We all piled on a bus and rode over to the Ark.

                The first view of the Ark was jaw-dropping. Simply amazing. Then when we got off the bus one of the moms snapped this picture of all of us getting these pictures of the Ark. What made the Ark that much better was the day we went it was supposed to storm, it was really windy and the sky was dark and overcast. It looked as if this was the real Ark and rain was about to fall to the Earth for the first time, flooding it, just like in Noah’s time. As we got closer and closer to the Ark we realized just how big it was. Enormous does not even come close to it. As a group we decided to start at the very top and work our way down because we knew the bottom would be crowded with everyone coming in. There are four floors to the ark however the fourth floor was not open when we went because they hadn’t finished it yet.

                
The third floor showed depictions of the living quarters and such. This was really neat however the makers of the Ark took creative liberties and added details and storylines to all the characters which are NOT found in the Bible. They fully admitted this and said anything that was in the Bible they did not contradict however they added on to make it more interesting. The third floor also had an exhibit on the Bible through History and there were Bibles in different languages and from different time periods which was interesting to my language fanatic friend. It also explained the post-flood world, and the Ice Age. Then the museum shows that every culture has a flood myth of some kind, exciting my other mythology fanatic friend. It also shows how, after the tower of Babel and the spread of people across the Earth, each culture built towers. The Egyptian pyramids, Native American Burial Mounds, and Aztec temples just to name a few.

                Then we moved down to the second floor which, for the most part, shows the technology of the boat. It shows how, using the technology of the time, Noah’s family could have taken care of all the animals on the ark. They had ideas for getting clean water, disposing of waste, and feeding animals among others. Once again these were not mention in the Bible but the archeologists and everyone working on the project tried their best to figure out what Noah and his family would have had at their disposal in both knowledge and materials. This floor has a live animal pen, it was not as exciting at the petting zoo the day before but someone did not care, at all. We did skip over some things on the second floor because they were repeats of what we had seen the day before with a pre-flood, Adam and Eve exhibit. The second is also where the door to the Ark is located and, of course, we got pictures.

                The first floor had some pretty neat exhibits too. It had a model of the Ark, it was an Ark inside of an Ark J it was about over six feet long and showed a more accurate depiction of how many animal cages would have had to be on the real ark. At the other end it showed how the animal cages would have been for both larger and small animals. There were rows upon rows of cages and all I could think was these were only a small fraction of all the cages that would have been on the real Ark. 

There was also a depiction of Noah and his family praying at the altar they built after the flood was over. They had a recording of a prayer playing in Hebrew through a sound system. While the Deaf could not experience that sound feature they could experience the one in the bow. It showed the inside of the stern and bow of the boat and how they were structured, but in the bow they had lightning and thunder which the Deaf could feel through the wooden floors. After that we went down to the gift shop where I bought a mug and bookmark before leaving. We rode the bus back to the parking lot and piled in the vans for the last leg of our journey.

                That afternoon/evening we drove back to the church so everyone could be at work the next morning. We spent 6 hours in the vans, only made three stops (gas, dinner, and 1 bathroom break) and made it back to the church by 10:00 PM. We did gain an hour on the way back over but we ignored that. After unloading and cleaning out the vans we all said goodbye and went our separate ways.

                I will never forget my experience to Deaf Day at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. I am so glad we went. Being able to look around and see everyone signing and watching the interpreters interpret all the videos and speakers all around the exhibits made the trip that much better.

Love God, Love Others, and Love Disney,

~Lacey