Nauticus is little more than a glorified Navy recruitment center for the pre-teen set, but we all took a field trip there in the year 1995 nonetheless. (Bonus: lunch at Waterside!) Supposedly Nauticus was the home of the world's first group virtual reality experience, but I sort of feel like Questor was a group virtual reality experience, wasn't it?

Anyway, Nauticus pretty much had only three attractions.

1) The People Mover. This was basically a conveyor belt that you stood on, and it became less exciting once you had traveled to an airport larger than the one in Norfolk, where they are quite common, and a LOT less exciting once they actually installed one at Norfolk "International" Airport.

2) The dog tag kiosk. Is it just me or was it kind of creepy for prepubescent kids to be wearing metal identification tags that exist solely to identify your body in the event the rest of you is charred to a crisp? Plus, they kind of made you look like a tool. The only famous people who wore dog tags were those bitches from Top Gun, and we all know what happened to the careers of Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Guy Who Died When His Ejector Malfunctioned. Leave the dog tags to those who actually need them.

3) Virtual reality. Everyone I knew skipped the actual education parts of Nauticus to secure a spot in the virtual reality line. I can't seem to find any information about it on the official Nauticus website. Perhaps they took it down because they realized that sending kids on a virtual mission to save the Loch Ness Monster's eggs is a shitty, shitty way to get them interested in maritime sciences and technology, seeing as how Loch Ness is a LAKE and the Loch Ness Monster is IMAGINARY.

I'm sorry, I take that last one back. Plesiosaurs are real.