Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture

"A nice museum, but a little expensive for the size"

Burke Museum is a nice museum on the edge of the University of Washington campus, about a 10 minute drive north from downtown Seattle. We arrived right at lunchtime and had a nice soup, sandwich, donut lunch down in the cafe. Not too expensive and pretty good portion sizes.

Then we headed up to the museum itself.  
The displays are on two floors- there is an elevator, so it's manageable with the stroller.  My toddler really enjoyed the natural history portion of the museum; he thought the giant mastodon skeleton was pretty fun to look at and he kept wanting to go back there to visit it.  My husband and I really enjoyed the exhibit about Antarctica and the Pacific Voices exhibit.  

Moving fairly slowly, it only took us about 45 minutes-1 hour to go through all the exhibits. Personally, I would think this is a little expensive if I had paid the $9.50/adult admission price (kids 4 and under are free, kids 5-18 are $6 each). We happened to have free tickets for this visit, so we didn't worry about it, but it's something to keep in mind. The exhibits are nice though and very interesting, so we did enjoy our visit a lot.

We visited on a Monday, which meant that parking was pretty crowded, since parking is in one of the University of Washington parking lots. You have to have a parking permit to park in the museum lot- it's $15 when you come in, then you get a partial refund if you stay less than 4 hours. We stayed a little less than 2 hours, including lunch and getting the kids in and out of the car, and ended up paying $6 for parking after the partial refund. Parking is cheaper/free during the weekend, so it's less of an issue if you visit then.

The museum is nice and worth a visit if you're in the area and if your family loves natural history/culture museums. I'd recommend visiting on the first Thursday of the month if you can- admission is free then and the museum stays open several hours later than usual!