I've been chased by a moose in Grand Teton. I've had a marmot steal my trekking pole in Glacier. But I've never voluntarily gotten in the water with a shark, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that you can do exactly that in Springfield, Missouri.

The Wonders of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium is next to the original Bass Pro Shops flagship store, which should tell you something about the scale of the operation. This isn't a couple of tanks in a strip mall. We're talking more than 1.5 million gallons of water housing over 35,000 live animals across immersive habitats. And the headliner, the thing that puts this place in a category almost nobody else occupies, is the chance to get in the water with actual sharks.

The Shark Dive experience lets everyday people, no scuba certification required, descend into a 200,000-gallon habitat alongside sand tiger sharks, brown sharks, and barracuda. You're in a cage, which I mention because I could see some of you already mentally canceling the trip. The cage keeps you safe. The sharks do what sharks do, which is swim around being magnificent and slightly terrifying.

I spend most of my time trying to get people out of buildings and into wild spaces. But controlled access to experiences that would otherwise require years of training or a whole lot of recklessness has real value. Not everyone is going to free-dive with reef sharks in the Bahamas. Some people are twelve years old. Some people have never touched the ocean. If a place like Wonders of Wildlife can put someone face-to-face with a sand tiger shark and make them fall in love with the ocean a little bit, I'm not going to complain that it happened indoors.

I'd normally give you the practical breakdown here. The dive suit, the briefing, the helmet system that lets you breathe without a tank on your back. But I haven't done this one myself yet, and I don't write up experiences I haven't had. What I can tell you is that the aquarium itself is worth the trip even if you never touch the water. The wildlife museum section has full-scale habitat dioramas, a two-story mountain, and interactive galleries that cover everything from the American prairie to African savannas. You could spend a full day and not see everything.

For the road trippers reading this, Springfield sits along Route 66 in southwest Missouri, which makes it a natural stop if you're doing the classic Mother Road run. Nick would probably tell you the best way to get there is whatever keeps you on two-lane roads as long as possible. I'd agree with him.

So I'm curious. When was the last time something in nature made your heart rate spike in a way that wasn't a thunderstorm rolling in while you're exposed on a ridge? For me it was a black bear on a trail in Yellowstone two summers ago. For you it might be a sand tiger shark cruising past a cage in Missouri. Either way, that feeling is worth chasing.

I'm adding this to my mental list of stops for a future Midwest road trip. If I end up in that cage, I'll report back on whether the sharks are as calm as the brochures promise or whether I panicked and knocked my regulator loose. Could go either way.