A while back, a few colleagues and I headed down to OMSI. They're currently hosting a traveling exhibit called "Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination." As children of the '80s, there was no chance we could resist the siren call of getting to see the Chewbacca costume up close.

While the exhibit does mix in a few displays linking emerging technologies to the Star Wars universe, it's mostly an excuse to trot out props and miniatures from the original trilogy. Oh, and they also had a teenager in a Boba Fett costume around to pose for photos.

The A-ticket attraction is a full-scale recreation of the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. For $5 we could have sat in Han Solo's seat and hit a few buttons to launch ourselves into a green screen hyperspace. Unfortunately, tickets were sold out for the rest of the day.

Oh well, at least we were able to stand within three feet of R2D2 and Luke's Landspeeder.

And these programmable robots were pretty gosh darn swell. It took a few tries but we finally managed to coax him across a patch of bumpy terrain and across a finish line.

All in all, it was at least 15 times cooler/geekier than the Star Trek exhibit that came through town years ago while I was still in grade school. I'm averaging about one trip to OMSI every eight years. It's nice to see they've held on to a few of the old classic exhibits. It's getting tougher and tougher to get in and out of that old lunar module with each passing decade.