Category: Miscellaneous

Before today’s destinations, we stopped by America’s least productive workplace:

Our first stop was the Air & Space Museum, which is apparently the Smithdonian’s most popular museum. Based on the crowds, I can believe that! It’s a massive place filled with extensive exhibits on flight and space exploration.

That’s the main space flight hall. All those rockets (including a V1, a V2, ICBM’s and many others) are real. They have an actual Skylab (the backup!), a Soyuz capsule, a Hubble prototype and much more.

Yes that’s real. It was originally built for a moon mission, but ultimately never left Earth.

That did leave Earth! You can still see the moon dust on the legs.

Amongst their other items on display were moon rocks (including one you can touch), the Apollo 11 capsule, Sputnik (yes a real one), many shuttle pieces including a piece of solid rocket fuel (which looks like an eraser) and so on and so on. It’s a mind-boggling collection that would take days to explore fully, and this is only half the museum!

The other half is devoted to flight, including a wealth of diverse exhibits. My favourite was the imaging exhibit, which included this photograph of one of the first aerial cameras:

We were both particularly interested in the piece of aerogel included in an exhibit about analyzing comets:

It’s the lightest solid ever invented, not much denser than air, and is so nebulous that it’s difficult to even focus on with your eyes. The piece above is about as big as an apple. Fascinating stuff!

In the afternoon we headed to the second most popular Smithsonian museum: Natural History.

This is an enormous museum dedicated to the natural world, which means plants and animals and rocks and humans.

As with Air & Space, you’d need days to fully explore this museum. In a few hours we were only able to scrape the surface!

A highlight was the gem collection, including a special display of the rarest jewels in the collection. The centerpiece is the famous Hope Diamond:

We also like seeing the stuffed Thylacine and the animal skeletons (including a Sea Cow, sadly now extinct).

Later in the day KLS returned to the hotel to relax and I hobbled off to yet another museum: the Postal Museum. If you like stamps (much more than me, if I’m honest) then this place would be heaven! I spent an hour or so browsing the voluminous displays, focusing on the rarest or most unusual, such as the only stamps ever to be canceled on the moon:

We visited only 5 of the dozen or so Smithsonian museums on this brief vacation, and (with the exception of the zoo) only managed to see a portion of each. Given how good they are, I’m not sure why it took me 20 years to get to them!