Museums galore

There are so many museums in Washington D.C. that you would have to be insane to try to see them all in one trip. We certainly made a valiant effort, but since we are not insane, we didn't get to more than a fraction. The first afternoon, we visited the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum (not to be confused with the National Gallery of Art, which we also visited later in the trip, or any of the other American Art or National Galleries in D.C.).

Benjamin visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum on his own one afternoon while I was at the ALA conference.  I went last year when I was in D.C. on my own, and figured that, being a natural history buff, he would want to spend a lot of time looking and wandering. And he did. I assume he saw this whale, since it is in the main hall and kind of hard to miss! (That picture is from my trip...he was too busy looking at the exhibits to remember to take pictures. The nerve...)

We visited the excellent American Indian Museum...where I was too busy looking at exhibits to take many pictures. And we stopped in at the National Air and Space Museum. That place was jammed, mostly with parents and children. Planes and such are rather interesting for children - go figure.

Anyway, we saw some of the museum, including the Spirit of St. Louis.  What is so strange about that plane to me is that there is no window in the front. I couldn't get a good picture of it, but Lindbergh would have had to stick his head out the side door or something to actually see...something confirmed by the Wikipedia article about the plane.

We also saw some of the space capsules and modules that were used in past space programs. It turns out that when they build the part that is going into space, they also build at least one back-up and/or training module. Those are what the museum has. So little! I think that my dreams of being an astronaut have been firmly squashed by the small size of the capsules and the design of the toilets (no pictures, sorry).

This one reminds me an awful lot of the Starbug used on Red Dwarf.

We didn't restrict ourselves to museums, of course. We also ate lots of good food. This was one of our favorite finds. A Mexican-style tapas restaurant. So very, very good.