MPH Travels: Monumental – 23 & 24/05/10

23/05/10

We began by visiting the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), part of the Smithsonian. It was amazing and took most of the day to see. All of the Smithsonian museums open at 10am and close as late as 7:30pm. The NMNH was absolutely awesome. We love museums.
We spent the last half of the afternoon in the Air and Space Museum, which is apparently the most visited museum in the United States. Wasn’t too busy for us though. We had a great time, saw the Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the bell X1, the Apollo 11 capsule, and many other important aircraft and spacecraft. There are interactive displays and there’s a heckuva lot to see. It was one of the best days ever.
We left the Air and Space Museum at about 6:30 and returned to our hotel. Dinner at the International House Of Pancakes next door. Yummy.

24/05/10

This morning we returned to the Air and Space Museum for a few hours to finish seeing it all. While there, we also saw a movie at the planetarium about black holes and another at the IMAX in 3D about the Hubble space telescope. Talk about brilliant.
We also spent a couple hours walking around the national Art Museum.
In the afternoon we walked around downtown and saw the Capitol building, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It is all very humbling. These monuments have been built to represent an ideal. A way of life. Admission is free to all these places because they belong to the people. They are very meaningful and it is great to have seen them. As I said, humbling.
On another note: The parks here are really thick with squirrels, ducks, geese and other critters. They don’t seem interested in us humans at all. Don’t seem real interested in the monuments either.

Back at the hotel we had beef gyros from a local Afghan restaurant for dinner. Yummy again.