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Do you remember the field trips you went on as a kid? Even if the trip was headed somewhere you’d been before, or someplace that wasn’t that exciting, there was something compelling about having to turn in that golden ticket of a permission slip, having a shortened class schedule, getting on a bus, perhaps having to hold hands or hold onto a rope, and getting shushed by the teacher in a brand-new environment.

Growing up in Buffalo, I visited Tifft Farm Nature Preserve and learned how maple syrup was tapped, how maple sugar candy was made, and never to drink a beverage if your field trip is anywhere with outhouses instead of bathrooms!

As a kindergartner, I visited the Mirrored Room at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and was transfixed by the mirrored walls, ceiling, and furniture, although the mirrored floor terrified me. Would I fall through into another world?

Throughout elementary school, I got to visit the planetarium built right into one of the district’s newest high schools (giving me an unrealistic expectation of high school fun). And on multiple visits to the Buffalo Museum of Science, I was shocked to come face-to-face with a wooly mammoth.

Yes, my sandwich was always soggy by lunchtime, and my feet were usually tired by the time the bus returned to school, but the whole experience gave kids a burst of energy during long stretches of weeks without holidays.

Couldn’t you use a field trip right about now?

Every day, another thousand blogs tell you how to effectively work from home, entertain and education your children, and be productive on a myriad list of home projects, all during the uncertainties of sheltering in place. And certainly, Paper Doll has thoughts on all of those things. But that’s not what today’s post is about. Because you need a break. (OK, I need a break. Even professional organizers lose their motivation in these wooly mammoth times.)

While you may not be able to take a drive downtown or hop on a subway, you can still ease your mind and stir your soul. You may not be able to pop out to the library, but you can borrow ebooks from your public library. You may not be able to attend a workshop, but there are TedTalks galore. But there’s nothing like the energy of going on a field trip…so off we go!

ORGANIZE FOR A VIRTUAL FIELD TRIP

It’s far too easy to click on some links, making your experiences every bit as quotidian as clicking over to Instagram or going down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. To make your field trip a mental, emotional, and visceral experience that feels like an adventure, follow these steps.

1) Make a production out of it. Get dressed up. Go outside, walk around the driveway, and come back in with fresh eyes. If your kids don’t have a lot of experience with museums, you can talk about how (when we go on real field trips), we don’t run, how we talk in hushed tones, and how we don’t push people, but we will be rewarded with magical experiences in huge rooms and bright colors and cool sites.

No tiny humans? You and your partner could dress in your fanciest clothes (or, y’know, not the same sweats you’ve been wearing all week) and agree to make the trip as vivid and special as possible. No stopping to check Twitter, no doing laundry.

On your own? Make it less of a solo excursion by sharing the experience with friends. Post a photo collage of yourself, your lunch (of which, more later), and the home screen of your visit’s location. “I’m going to the Louvre today. Ask Me Anything!” Periodically, post something surprising that you’ve learned. Even if you’re alone, you don’t have to be lonely on your field trip.

Even if you're alone, you don't have to be lonely on your field trip. Share on X

Make time for your trip. Don’t just sandwich a quick whirl through the web between working on your sourdough starter and bingeing the next episode of Kitten Prince. (OK, I know, but I’m not giving that show any more press!)

Build it into the homeschool day, or schedule it for after dinner on a work-from-home Zoom-filled workday. Experiences are far more memorable than tangible things, which is why they make better gifts than things that turn into clutter. Give yourself a gift of the field trip experience.

Pack a lunch. Remember the brown paper sack lunches for field trips? Paper Mommy was always a room mother, helping corral the kids, but she tucked a note and a little doodled self-portrait into my lunch, folded in with my napkin, nonetheless. Perhaps you could tuck a little quiz or puzzle into a bagged lunch for your kids (or partner, or housemate)?

Or do the museum café thing and try to make a fancy coffee. Break out some wine and quarantine cheese, and make a night of it. When I toured the UK last September, we had gorgeous weather in Scotland, Wales, and most of England, but our only full day in London was dark and rainy all morning, and plagued with kerfuffles. Once we got to the British Museum, we were feeling a bit overwhelmed; there was too much to see in the few hours we had, and we were damp and cranky. After an hour of trying to hit the guidebook highlights (including the actual Rosetta Stone!), we stopped at one of the pop-up cafés on an upper floor, and surrounded by art, had little cakes and beverages, which refreshed our bodies and gave us verve.

You’ve been locked in for perhaps a month. Take your verve where you can get it!

Do some research. Learn things before you set off for about what you’re about to see, and wrap up with investigating more about what you’ve just experienced. If you were in school, your teacher would prepare a unit in art or Social Studies (do they still call it that?) or science so you’d know a bit before the big day.

Heading to a National Park, if only in your mind? Find out how Teddy Roosevelt helped to create the National Parks System, or sign your tiny human up to be a Junior Ranger. Going to a Van Gogh exhibit? Watch the (whole) Doctor Who episode, Vincent and the Doctor. (Grab tissues.)

Ask some questions and share your thoughts. What did you like best? What surprised you?

When I was small, Paper Mommy taught me a game where we looked at each painting in which a person or animal appeared, and we narrated what they were thinking or feeling. In general, we were snarky, but I’ve now played this game in every museum or art gallery I’ve ever visited, from Chattanooga to Chicago, from Cannes to London to Florence, making up a cinematic backstory for every “character” or scene played out in grand paintings and sculptures. 

(What do you think he’s thinking?)

Visiting sea or land creatures on your virtual visit? Talk to your kids about what you learn, and ask them to compare or contrast aspects of how the animals care for their young or live with their families to the way humans do it. With a fellow grownup? Discuss aspects of animal life you wish more humans embraced. Or, y’know, talk to one another in faux animal voices. You do you, boo!

Thinking and wondering, rather than just looking, makes your field trip (and the things you saw on it) much more vivid.

Make a plan for a real field trip in the future. Quarantine will end. Someday, we will be traveling again, visiting again, vacationing again. Use what you learn on your field trips to make some proactive, mindful plans to help you hold on to your vision of the future. 

Visit the gift shop. No field trip is complete without looking through the tchotchkes being sold. Some places, like the MOMA, have gift shops that rival Amazon for the amazing things you can acquire. But by visiting virtually, there’s no pressure to quickly decide between making a purchase or missing out. (And most museum shops, like the Musée Dorsay store, has temporarily suspended shipping orders, anyway.) Bookmark the product page, and you can always return to buy 24/7 if there’s something that captivates you days or weeks after your field trip.

The rest of this post is designed to give you a whole host of thrilling options for your field trips, but please feel welcome to share your own favorites in the comments. Where have you visited? Where will you go?

EXPERIENCE THE WORLD’S NATURAL BEAUTY

One of the most exciting ways to travel while sheltering in place is via one one particular new exhibit and interactive documentary from the increasingly cool Google Arts & Culture project. It was launched this spring to celebrate the Centennial of the National Parks Service. (Thanks, Teddy!)

These are no mere coffee table book photos. You can take 360° tours of U.S. National Parks. You probably know a little (or a lot) about the big ones, like the Grand Canyon (yes, even if all you remember is what you saw that Brady Bunch episode!) or Yosemite.

But this exhibit concentrates on the parks you might know less about, like Alaska’s Kenai Fjords, New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, Florida’s Dry Tortugas (which sounds like a food truck menu item), Utah’s Bryce Canyon, and Hawaii’s volcanoes.

Of course, once you start searching for virtual field trip options in the world of nature, the opportunities seem boundless. Consider the Nature Conservancy of Oklahoma‘s OK360° guided tours and hikes. 

Wish you could commune with nature? Take a virtual dive with the National Marine Sanctuaries and visit some watery depths from American Samoa to the Florida Keys to the Olympic Coast. Virtual dives let you see an underwater habitat (and even some sunken treasures) using only your computer, phone, or virtual reality headset.

Be cure to check out nature-oriented livestreams, too, like:

The Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, where you can visit with Fiona, the baby hippopotamus. 

The Georgia Aquarium’s African Penguin webcam; you can also visit the tuxedoed birds’ neighbors via the beluga whale, alligator crossing, and piranha webcams!

The world-famous San Diego Zoo’s webcams — apes, baboons, burrowing owls, condors, elephants, pandas, polar bears, tigers, butterflies…take your pick, but right now, I’m sticking with their koala cam! 

The New England Aquarium’s virtual visits follows along as the penguins are fed or the giant ocean tank is cleaned, and there’s a YouTube playlist of all of the NEAQ’s virtual visits.  

Canada’s Farm Food 360° offers eleven virtual tours, from dairy cow and egg farms, to sheep and pig farms, to grain farms and feed mills. Sometimes, nature isn’t just there to be seen, but to help sustain us as well.

And if the natural world of days gone by is more your field trip style, take a jaunt through the online exhibits of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Perhaps you’ll feel less like a dusty fossil after a panoramic view of some old bones (and butterflies, and gems, and ancient history).

TAKE A VISIT TO THE ART MUSEUM

Not really an outdoorsy person or an animal lover? (Paper Doll feels your pain.) You can focus your mind with art!

Start with Google Arts and Culture’s Uffizzi Galleries, where you get the Google “street view” of Florence, Italy’s most famous art gallery. (I visited the Uffizzi in 2018; it’s breathtaking, in terms of both the art and the views of the city through upper floor windows, but I’m sure this virtual visit is less exhausting.)

Not all tours need to be 360° visits. Sometimes, you want to see things up-close and personal. Paris Musées, a group of 14 Paris museums, including Maison de Balzac, Petit Palais, and Maison de Victor Hugo, have made high-resolution digital copies of 100,000 artworks freely available to the public on their collections website. Look at everything (making a daily lunchtime field trip) or stare at one work, transfixed, like Cameron at the Chicago Art Museum in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (While you’re at it, read what filmmaker John Hughes had to say about those scenes!)

Weren’t we talking about Van Gogh a little while ago? Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, which houses the largest collection of the tortured Post-Impressist master, has put nearly one thousand of his paintings and drawings online and developed a Van Gogh At Home teaching program to help parents share art with their children.

So even if you feel like you haven’t been out of your house in 132 years, you can snuggle under a blanket and view Van Gogh’s 1888 The Bedroom from the comfort of your own room.

Other amazing options for an art-related field trip:

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY.

The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. (One current virtual tour is Degas at the Opéra! Also check out Google Arts and Culture’s panoramic tour of the NGA.)

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. (In addition to the Google Arts and Culture tour, the NPS has designed a “Visit at Home” program.)

Always wanted to visit the Louvre? Open Culture has gathered three high-definition videos from Wanderlust Travel Videos so you can see Mona Lisa‘s smile, but also many lesser-known works.

Musée Dorsay in Paris, France.

Tate Modern in London, England – From the Bath of Psyche to 500 Years of British Art, you’ll have your pick of views.

The British Museum in London, England is huge and glorious. And exhausting. But they’ve developed 11 tips for exploring from home and you won’t have to jockey for a view of Rosetta Stone. 

Is this feeling too highbrow for you? What about a Google street view of 12 Banksy murals?

Maybe you don’t even want to take a field trip to see the art, per se, but you just want to see art about the art? The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has developed a map of the museum for the whole family. (Scroll down, then read the article at Atlas Obscura.)

Don’t feel like even thinking about where to click? Just want the experience to wash over you? How about this 5-hour, one-take journey through St. Petersburg, Russia’s Hermitage Museum. 45 galleries, 588 masterpieces. Sure, it’s basically an ad for Apple’s iPhone 11, but it’s worth the price of admission (which, of course, is free).

And if you don’t know where you’d like to take a field trip to see art, try the Art Camera. Pick just one piece of art (Manet’s The Conservatory? Frieda Kahlo’s Self-Portrait With Monkey? Rembrandt’s The Night Watch?) and get up-close and personal with just one painting, learning every brush stroke.

GET SOME PERSPECTIVE FROM YOUR COUCH

It’s easier for art museums to put their collections online. History museums and interactive exhibits are a little more complex. However, whatever fascinates you in this world likely has a museum. Try firing up your search engine and typing in the subject, the word museum, and “at home” or “virtual” to see what comes up.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has video resource guide for exploring their archives available from home. This might be the perfect time to participate in the Community Curation Project, sort your photos, and find your family’s history in American history.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has over 100 online exhibits. They aren’t all ready-for-Prime-Time, but if history is your jam, field trips to the past will keep you busy for so long, you’ll forget that you’re sheltering in place while you’re traveling in time.

The National Women’s History Museum has a wide variety of exciting online exhibits on topics as wide-ranging as the women of NASA to women in Congress, from women who campaigned for suffrage and civil rights to women who waged World War II.

Things will get better, so consider signing for memberships with your local cultural venues. Time Travelers is a reciprocal membership network for historical museums and societies throughout the United States. Members of historical institutions can receive exclusive benefits and privileges at museums and historical sites nationwide, including free or reduced admission, gift shop discounts, free parking, and much more. Your local museums, zoos, and other venues likely offer similar reciprocal opportunities.

GRAB SOME LITERATURE WITH YOUR LATTE

Perhaps a poetry reading is more your style? Patrick Stewart has been reading Shakespearean sonnets, most in numerical order, each day. (He declared that #5 was “too hard.”) Here’s just one.

Sonnet 3#ASonnetADay pic.twitter.com/hI4GzH49P8

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 24, 2020

EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL AT THE BALLET (AND THE OPERA, TOO)

You already know about music streaming services like Spotify and Amazon Music, but what about visiting the opera or taking in some classical music?

The Metropolitan Opera is offering nightly streams of operas, as well as free streaming events for students.

London’s Royal Opera House has a massive YouTube playlist of the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet. The sidebar includes affiliated groups, like the Welsh National Opera and the Scottish Opera. 

The Berlin Philharmonic is presenting livestreams, though I’ve yet to find a translation option for English. But music is supposed to be a universal language!

AND MORE

As a professional organizer, I eschew clutter. As a curious person who fancies herself a completist, I like to collect ALL of the options. 

And if nothing I have suggested piques your interest, the MCN (formerly the Museum Computer Network) had a mind-boggling list of hundreds of virtual museum resources to serve your needs: museum portals, art and cultural museums, museums of history and natural science, online exhibits, e-learning opportunities, and digital archives. Suddenly, it almost seems like quarantine won’t last long enough.

I know you probably wish you were out and about, but until we are all traveling freely about the planet, unmasked, take some time to give yourself some daily or weekly delights. Have some great field trips. Just skip the ones that only have an outhouse.