It's Spamalicious! Spamtastic! SPAM Museum

Spam!  Welcome to Austin, MN home of the Spam Museum!  Mom wanted to go here because she grew up with SPAM, growing up in Hawaii, and she had the honor of being crowned SPAM QUEEN in 1989 at Camp Orkila.  She had to go on stage in front of 650 people and carve a sculpture out of a can of SPAM in 3 minutes with a plastic knife, tell story and sing a song.  She got one of the old SPAM Keys used to open cans until 1989 as her prize for carving the Sphinx!  She can tell you her Spam jelly story it gross the kids out.  So, we went the other day and it was SPAMTASTIC! Just driving into the town fills your nose with the spiced ham smell.  Hormel Family have made a very nice museum with elaborate, expensive exhibits that were entertaining and fun.  We went not knowing wht to expect, but found it was cool once we walked by the giant wall of SPAM cans in the lobby and met their mascot...a can of SPAM called SPAMMY.  Their double doors were pig faces and they had a conveyer belt winding through with over 800 cans of SPAM on it.  Our favorite part was the hologram military man who talks to you from his tent and tells you all about the history of SPAM and it's use in the military feeding troops an keeping them healthy and belly's full.  Hormel was very concerned with germs and cleanliness and wanted a safe way to can and store meat for the troops and be able to eat without a kitchen on the battlefield.  They pioneered new canning processes and used high quality ingredients that were difficult to use otherwise.  The front legs of the hogs have huge bones that are usually made into spiral hams only and instead he cooked and mashed the shoulder meat as it was a good cut but hard to process commercially.

I really liked the Monty Python Spam act theater where they showed the skit form their old tv show. I like Monty Python a lot (You tube has the video). The museum had competitive trivia games and assembly lie packaging competitions, cooking and recipe area, tons of history and told the story of how Mr. Hormel gave the company to his son after 15 years of working his way up.  Hormel Sr. retired to California to let his son run the company as he saw fit and under Hormel Jr. the company thrived becoming world-wide and very successful.  Hawaii eats the most SPAM of anywhere in the world.  There are lots of flavors of SPAM: cheese, hickory smoke, garlic, peppered and spicy.  We couldn't believe how many things they had in their gift shop that involved..."gasp" SPAM!  There was even SPAM singles, spam spread and my mom and I think there should be SPAM popcorn seasoning! They put a lot of thought into the voices, activities and best of all it's FREE! This museum is SPAM-ILICIOUS!

Happy Trails (and SPAM),
Jack