Harry Potter at the Franklin Institute

We drove to Philadelphia yesterday to go to the Franklin Institute because there was a Harry Potter exhibit that we wanted to see; we went there back in 2016 for a Science of Pixar exhibit that was awesome, so we had high hopes for the Harry Potter exhibit.

Let me preface my brief review by saying that in 2019, we went to the Harry Potter Warner Brothers Studio Tour in London. It was incredible and we were under no delusions that this would be as good, but we were still hoping that this would be worthwhile.

Overall, it was absolutely worth the three-hour drive and what they had for guests to see was great. However, there were definitely some issues. First of all, there were SO MANY PEOPLE. We were crammed into small, cramped areas and at times, ended up waiting in long lines in one spot for 5-7 minutes at a time. This was in spite of the fact that the tickets were timed and we were not let into the exhibit until the official time on our tickets. Secondly, the layout of the exhibit was extremely problematic because there were "bottleneck" areas throughout the entire thing due to narrow hallways and small rooms. Did the creators of the exhibit not understand how many people would be visiting the exhibit? Which issue caused the bigger problem - were there too many people for the given space or were the spaces too small for the number of people allowed in? The answer? Both.

On top of that, the air conditioning was either broken or not in use, because it was insanely hot in the exhibit - which, coupled with the crowds and the waiting around in small spaces, made for a subpar experience.

However, all of that nonsense aside, we had a great day. The love of Harry Potter helped to balance out our annoyance at the exhibit and we spent a few hours before our ticket time wandering around Philly, which was fun. And as I hope you can see from the photos, the displays were really good!

The most hilarious thing that happened was that before we were allowed to enter the exhibit, we had to stop at a kiosk and each create an account with our names, emails addresses, and zip codes. We despise providing personal information in these kinds of situations, so we decided to put fake names into the system. What we didn't know was that in one of the rooms inside the exhibit, you scan a bracelet upon entering, and your name appears on a huge screen of the Marauder's Map! A very cool feature, but as you'll see from the picture below, our names did garner some attention from the other guests in the room with us! LOL!

this was the huge screen before
any names were displayed

McGonagall was me - not really out of place
and I like to think it came across as cute;
Yoda of Dagabah was C - people were
highly amused when they saw it

Happy Tails to you!