From the ordinary to the extraordinary, museums hold vast treasures 

No matter what you like, there’s probably a museum for it.

You yourself might have what it takes to make a museum on your unique or obscure interest.

An easy drive away is the Simpson Funeral Museum in Chatham. It’s run by Scott Simpson, a casket-maker who opened it in 2014 in an old undertaking parlor. The museum is at 16 Main St., Chatham. Opening hours have been advertised as 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and 9 a.m. to noon Saturdays; call 434-432-1085 or email simpsonfm@comcast.net to confirm. Meanwhile, the largest funeral service museum is the National Museum of Funeral History, which covers 30,500 square feet in Houston.

In Martinsville, we had a museum dedicated to fairy stones until it closed just a couple of years ago. Don Hopkins became fascinated by fairy stones when he lived in Patrick County. First, he collected them, and then he sorted his collection into big ones, little ones and medium ones, and then he got even more detailed in his sorting and displaying, and sharing them with the world, on the first floor of a two-story building on A.L Philpott Highway in Horsepasture.

I liked that museum, because I respect anyone who follows his passion and does something about it. When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in a class on rocks, and our instructor had a rock museum of sorts in the basement of his home. On the last night, we went there on a fieldtrip. That magic basement full of sorted and labeled rocks was great, and very a very exciting place for a fifth grader.

When my daughter and I travel, we pull off the highway to tour any museum for which we see a sign. That’s what brought us to our favorite one so far, the American Museum of the House Cat in Sylva, North Carolina. She still asks me to take her back there.

I like potatoes. Do you like potatoes? Just yesterday, I had potato salad at lunch and a baked potato at supper. If we were in Blackfoot, Idaho, we most definitely would have stopped by the Idaho Potato Museum, but alas, we were way over here on the East Coast.

At the International Spy Museum, visitors experience as much as they look at things: They arrive at a briefing center, are issued a cover identity and are encouraged to remain undercover and gather information in ways such as crawling through an air duct to spy on others and cracking codes. Before they leave, they go through a debriefing exercise that evaluates their spying success.

The International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland is all about unknown and mysterious animals such as bigfoot, Sasquatch, mermaids and Santa Claus. The Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center is in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Neon signs can be seen practically everywhere, but nowhere so much as in Las Vegas. Thus, it makes sense that the Sin City is home to the Neon Museum, home of more than 250 historic Las Vegas signs. The Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum is in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and the Celebrity Lingerie Hall of Fame is in Los Angeles.

The National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin, showcases 6,000 mustards from 70 countries. The SPAM Museum, dedicated to that canned meat product, is in Austin, Minnesota.

Where in the world else would you expect to find the International UFO Museum and Research Center than Roswell, New Mexico, the site of a 1947 crash of a flying saucer that the US military claimed was a weather balloon but remains fodder of speculation?

The Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, California, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The National Videogame Museum is in Frisco, Texas.

If we see graffiti in Martinsville, it would be bad. If you saw it in Miami, however, you may be inside the Museum of Graffiti, which has 11 outdoor murals, a fine art gallery and exhibits. It also offers graffiti classes for both children and adults.

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore is for the works of self-taught, not professionally trained, artists – and then there’s the Museum of Bad Art in Boston, Massachusetts.

There’s a particular type of museum housed inside the Good Vibrations store in San Francisco (of course!), but I would be too embarrassed to tell you the name or nature of the museum, and you wouldn’t want to read those words unprepared, either. Just suffice it to say that there really is a museum for anything.

Worldwide, there’s the Beijing Tap Water Museum in China, Avanos Hair Museum in Turkey, Bread Museum in Germany, British Lawnmower Museum in England, Dog Collar Museum in England, an instant ramen museum in Japa, a museum for curried sausage in Berlin and a museum of death in Thailand.

For a small city, Martinsville packs a mighty punch in terms of culture. We have turned into a museum city, with the standard trifecta of museums: science, art and history, with the Virginia Museum of Natural History, Piedmont Arts and the MHC Heritage Museum, which already covers the former Henry County Courthouse but is about to expand into the new 13,000-square-foot building behind (and connected to) the courthouse.

When is the last time you’ve been to a museum? Summer, with the kids out of school, is a great time. It’s a fun way to spend time together while learning about life and people and society and broadening your horizons.

Our museums are the classics, but if you do want to see some weird things, we can accommodate. At the MHC Heritage Museum, where I am the director, I could show you the typewriter that types a letter per line at a time down a page, rather type in order across the page; or things that look like maracas but really are sewing machine attachments, or a record player that plays records that are tubular, in the shape of a soda can, rather than flat, as society knows records to be. You’ll find some neat stuff at Piedmont Arts and VMHN, too.