11/28/2021
Since I’ve been to Washington DC before and had done all the touristy stuff I wasn’t going to spend more than the day here. If you’ve never been, definitely take your time and see all the monuments, buildings, and museums. Some of the museums are free so take advantage.
Take the subway everywhere because parking is a nightmare downtown. The subway here was a little different from everywhere else. You have to buy a card first of all, which is a bummer. Secondly, you have to swipe to get to the train and to leave. I thought I was getting double charged, but I don’t think I was.
The first place I went was the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. This was as cool as it was the last time I went. They had sections dedicated to the oceans, dinosaurs, animals, African history, ancient humans, insects, birds, minerals and gems, and finally diseases. I’m guessing that the disease section was the newest so they could teach how pandemics work.
As soon as you walk in the front door there is a T-Rex skull, very cool. I most enjoyed the dinosaur and mineral/gem sections. Some of the deep ocean stuff was cool too. Some highlights were the original Audubon Birds of America book, the Hope Diamond, and a giant squid. There is so much to see here, it took me a couple hours to get through and I was scanning parts of it. The gem room was packed so I mostly skipped that unfortunately.
I had to cross the National Mall to get to my next stop and i snapped a pic of the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Castle.
I was going to go straight to the National Air and Space Museum, but an exhibit ,Futures, at the Arts and Industries Building caught my eye. There wasn’t much to it as I found out. It was supposed to be about new technologies for the future. They had one of the pods for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, a flying car, some AI stuff, some video game stuff, and for some reason a Marvel’s Eternals display. It only took me 20 minutes to see everything.
The museum I was most excited about, the National Air and Space Museum, I found out was in the middle of a renovation. This was a huge bummer since they had both of the hangers closed to the public. They only had the space, navigation, and Wright brothers exhibits open. They space part was meh, I’d seen all of that stuff recently. The navigation part was interesting. They showed how people navigated in the ancient world, figuring out latitude and longitude, radio navigation, the evolution of clocks and chronographs, to GPS and space navigation. They had a few atomic clocks there, scaling from huge computers to atomic clocks on a chip.
I’d seen a lot of the Wright Bros. information when I was in Ohio, but they did have the original Wright flyer, which was pretty neat.
That was all the sightseeing that I had planned on doing while in the city. Next, I made my way to the Hard Rock to get a pin. The only real interesting thing they had there was Bill Clinton’s saxophone.
I hopped back on the subway and went down to Nationals Park. A brewery that was suggested to me by someone, no idea who, was down in the area too. They had just finished replacing a bridge near the stadium and were tearing down the supports from the old one so I snapped a pic. Bluejacket was a really nice brewery with a terrible assortment of beers. I found a couple that I did like and watched part of the Vikings game there.
I got back on the subway and headed back to the van. I then drove to FedEx Field, home of the Washington Football Team; formerly the Redskins.
I’m planning on going through WV tomorrow and stopped for the night in Centerville, VA.