Robot Claw

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!

The subway here has striking architecture:

And the stations are very deep underground, necessitating long escalators on which KLS got a bit scared:

We rode the Metro to the National Zoo, one of the Smithsonian institutions. As with all the Smithsonians, this is a free attraction that frankly does a poor job on its website describing just how wonderful it is!

The enclosures are large and nicely landscaped, the animals are active and easily viewed, and the zoo overall is as good as the best I’ve been to. If you ever visit Washington, put this near the top of your list.

That’s an arapaima, in the amazon exhibit. It’s almost as big as Kristin! We also saw countless birds, big cats, monkeys and apes, bears, reptiles and many more.

Have you ever wondered why zoos always have large flocks of flamingo, rather than just a few? The answer is for breeding: flamingos don’t breed unless there are at least 20! This fact was discovered by scientists at this very zoo.

That’s the underwater viewing section for the seals. I was impressed by not just the animal enclosures, but also the way the zoo has architectured the viewing of the animals, often with multiple-levels or overhead sections such as a bridge that runs far above the elephants:

The big draw of this zoo are their pandas. Here’s the mother and her cub Bao Bao:

I took the second shot through a telescope! You may wonder exactly where Bao Bao is, since only the mum is visible sleeping on the rock. She’s in the pine tree to the left of her mum, about 20 feet off the ground! Apparently she spends most of her daytime in the tree these days. She wasn’t sleeping, just playing and climbing and charming the large crowds there to see her 🙂

As I said, the zoo was great. Although we were quite tired afterwards, we decided to go and ‘finish’ the Museum of American History.

The museum has many different exhibits (war, transportation, money, presidents, electricity, culture, food etc) but our favourite by far was seeing the original ‘star spangled banner’, which is a gigantic flag made in 1814 that was flown during a battle that inspired the national anthem. I may not be American born, but I found this exhibit deeply moving.

That’s the original Miss Piggy, who has always been one of my mums favourites. This was in an exhibit on culture. Apparently this museum is sometimes nicknamed ‘Americas attic’ for the range of items it owns and exhibits. Here’s another example (from the food exhibit):

Nostalgia attack! Who would have thought those old polystyrene containers would end up in a museum? 🙂

Tomorrow we’re planning the Air and Space and Natural History museums. Can we see them both in one day, or will we collapse from exhaustion? I guess we’ll find out 🙂

The train trip was long and I kept falling asleep. After passing through New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Delaware and Maryland we eventually arrived at Washington DC. We had spoiled ourselves with a suite hotel very close to the national mall, but were both amazed by how comfortable our suite is!

We wasted no time crossing the street to the mall. A brief stop at the Smithsonian visitors center and a whirlwind tour of one level of the museum of American History (more on Saturday…) and then we decided to see the sites.

That’s midway between the Capitol Building (yes, spelled with an ‘o’) and the Washington Monument. We decided to leave the Capitol until later and headed to the impressive monument.

It’s so tall! Much taller than we ever thought, and very impressive from any distance. Here’s a shot of KLS at the base showing the sheer size:

As we were there a US government helicopter kept flying over doing brief return flights from just south of the monument to the White House lawn. I wonder who he was transporting?

Continuing west along the mall led to the reflecting pool. We walked the length. The entire area is beautiful and well kept and very tourist friendly. This is a good thing, since there are more tourists here than I’ve ever seen in a US city. Here’s a look back from the western edge of the pool.

Turning around after taking the above photo you see this:

This is the Lincoln Memorial, which is also much bigger than either of us expected. This massive building contains just one thing really: the famous statue of Abraham Lincoln:

Don’t assume from the above shot that this was an unpopular attraction. Quite the contrary! Of course everyone wanted to pose with Lincoln, and I noted that almost all of them were tourists. I guess he’s an inspiration to everyone 🙂

We then headed back east and then north from the monument to a certain residence. Here it is:

We had to pose for a shot with The President (he’s waving at the camera from the window):

Security here was impressive. Four strong fences separate the public from The White House and a multitude of security vehicles and personnel are visible all around. I find this a little sad, but I suppose it is necessary in today’s world.

Have you ever seen such variety in an ice cream truck?!?

The next two days we’re going to visit several of the Smithsonian museums. I wonder what wonders we’ll see?