Agree! The Milwaukee Art Museum is definitely worth a detour (or a mileage run). Bata Shoe Museum is great, if you like shoes. In NYC the Frick Collection is a gem, and further uptown are the Hispanic Society and the Cloisters. Just scratching the surface without leaving North America....

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The Imperial War museum at Duxford is of special interest to frequent flyers. It is mostly a military aviation museum but has some civilian aviation items You get to go inside a Concorde and other airliners, some quite old. Also seeing a B52, a B29 and an SR-71 in the same room indoors was impressive.

For unusual & interesting try the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.

+1 on the spy museum. Great fun!

The Wild Centre, Tupper Lake, NY. Beautiful rural setting, hands on exploration of flora and fauna of the region. Kids loved it, so do the adults.

not for the faint hearted, but the Torture Museum in Pragues is really quite cool...if a little scary :)

National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan.

It is better than any museum on the Chinese mainland mainly because all the items were taken from mainland China.

I'd highly recommend the City Museum in St. Louis. In this case, a picture probably is worth a thousand words, but I don't have a picture, so here's a brief overview from their website:

Housed in the 600,000 square-foot former International Shoe Company, the museum is an eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel made out of unique, found objects. The brainchild of internationally acclaimed artist Bob Cassilly, a classically trained sculptor and serial entrepreneur, the museum opened for visitors in 1997 to the riotous approval of young and old alike.

Cassilly and his longtime crew of 20 artisans have constructed the museum from the very stuff of the city; and, as a result, it has urban roots deeper than any other institutions’. Reaching no farther than municipal borders for its reclaimed building materials, City Museum boasts features such as old chimneys, salvaged bridges, construction cranes, miles of tile, and even two abandoned planes!

How about the Menil Collection in Houston?
menil.org
It's almost a neightnorhood of its own with various exhibition sites, including the especially-constructed Rothko Chapel.

^

Excellent way to spend an afternoon in Houston.

+2.

But my favourite is:
Newseum in Washington DC.
newseum.org
It's basically a journalism themepark. Spectacular. I spent almost the entire day there.

Image: http://dcstyleisreal.files.wordpress...16_newseum.jpg

TripAdvisor review: http://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction..._Columbia.html

Cantigny, outside Chicago. It's the former estate of Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Beautiful grounds, tour of McCormick's quirky mansion, and a really well done interactive 1st Infantry Division Museum (McCormick served in that unit in WW1). All for free.

Warsaw Rising Museum, Warsaw, Poland. Very moving.

Another vote for Newseum in DC for interactive/history category.

Other faves: Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (IM Pei building alone is spectacular). Getty LA, less for the art than for the building. Pergamon Berlin for the reconstructed ruins. Neue Galerie Manhattan for my favorite art styles. Te Papa Wellington for natural history and anthro.

I've lived here since 1992 (and have worked as a journalist) and I've never heard of it. Will have to make a visit sometime soon.