One Week in DC in July

OR - Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen*.

We knew when we made our plans to visit DC that the weather was likely to be hot and humid, but we managed to pick one of the worst weeks of the summer. I won’t belabor this point in the rest of the post, but we kept our outside time as minimal as possible and hydrated a lot (the one day we wandered the mall and monuments we started as early as we could manage and tried to walk from shady path to shady path). The Weather channel forecast didn’t do the horribleness justice since it didn’t show the high humidity:

[* “Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen” is attributed to Rudyard Kipling, the full quote is “Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” and probably refers to how the English acted in India when it was a British colony.]

Our basic plan for the week was lots of sight seeing and visiting as many of the Smithsonian museums as possible/were interesting to us. The Smithsonians are all free to enter, so it was also relatively easy to pop in and out of them, though some of them require a timed entry ticket. The one good thing about the week we picked was that congress was not in session, so it was much less crowded and the traffic had much less impact on our efforts to get around the capitol. Of course, we did not plan it that way, this was a totally random serendipitous event - one of our ride share drivers was kind enough to explain it to us when we asked about the absence of crowds even on the weekend. Added bonus - we managed to get photos of monuments/memorials without too many random people in them.

Lincoln Memorial is My Fave Monument in DC.

Here’s the overview of the week, with photos - you can jump to the ones you are interested in if you don’t want to look at them all:

• Mall and Monuments - I just love how this is all laid out in downtown DC.

• Natural History Museum - I know, I know, we go to a lot of them. This one was great too.

• National Gallery - we got to see the only Da Vinci currently in the Americas.

• Air and Space Museum #1 (on the Mall) - so much air and space history. My fave exhibit was the one about the Wright Brothers.

• Air and Space Museum #2 (out by Dulles) - so many actual aircraft and spacecraft in one place! See the space shuttle in the photo above? That’s the THIRD space shuttle I’ve gotten to see live and in person (the first one was an actual launch that I watched from the countdown timer when I was 23 😎).

In between sightseeing expeditions, we really enjoyed our stay in Georgetown - we found a cute little airbnb that was the top floor of a duplex about 2-3 miles from the Mall. There were a ridiculous number of coffee places within half a mile of our place, so we tried a different one almost every day - it was a nice way to start each day (and the best time of day for a stroll). There was also a lot of good food nearby - convenient, since we did not have the time/energy for cooking.

The row of duplexes on our street.

Me and our duplex.

The fabulous display at the best coffee place near us.

The Mall and Monuments:

The number one thing I wanted to do in DC was wander the Mall and check out all the monuments/memorials. I find them both beautiful and inspirational.

On the way from our place to the mall - the beautiful Potomac.

View of Washington Monument from the Lincoln Memorial & people exercising their 1st Amendment rts.

Definitely inspirational.

Korean War Memorial - had never seen it before.

The shady path along the reflecting pool on the way to the Washington Monument.

WWII Memorial - Had never seen this one before either!

I enjoyed taking this photo from within the shade of the monument.

The White House is so close!

View of the Lincoln Memorial from the base of the Washington Monument.

Capitol Hill - we were not able to get in from this side and it was too hot to check the other side.

Jefferson Memorial - we were able to stay in the shade for 90% of the walk from the Mall.

Natural History Museum:

We really enjoyed this Natural History Museum. In addition to the usual displays of dinosaurs, animals/fish and gems/minerals, there was an interesting exhibit on African culture with sayings from a variety of different areas. I’ve included some of my favorite words of wisdom below.

The entry hall. It was nice to see a non-Dino featured and this one was very majestic.

Action!

We learn something new every time.

Ancient elephant skeleton.

Truth.

These were all good, but I liked the last one best.

This one cracked me up. In a great way - so much truth.

My favorite of all of them.

Even the stairways had interesting stuff.

I loved the oceans exhibit.

The Hope Diamond!

From the side, so you can see how thick it is.

I thought these were extra pretty and I don’t think I’d seen anything like them before.

National Gallery:

Originally, we were not sure we were going to have time for the National Gallery, but a couple of our friends told us we should make the time if we could. I’m glad we did - we visited their sculpture garden first, saw the only Da Vinci currently in the Americas, and enjoyed a lot of the old masters paintings we saw. We skipped the Roudin exhibit because we’ve been to the one in France, so we did not think this would compete 😎.

Crazy how much this one changes as you walk around it. Genius.

Title of this one cracked me up. It’s a RABBIT.

“Thinker on the Rock”

The entry way on one of the floors. Magnificent.

Daniel in the Lions’ Den

The aforementioned Da Vinci.

“Interior of St Peters, Rome” by Panini

We sat and stared at this one for a bit - it was so detailed.

Air & Space Museum #1

I have to give the Smithsonian a lot of credit - these museums were laid out really well, and thoughtfully, including adding some of the human interest parts of the history and innovation that might be more of interest to the non-engineers/fliers out there. We enjoyed the planetarium show about the latest finds in our solar system, captured by space probes launched years ago.

As I said, my favorite exhibit was the one on the Wright brothers because it gave so much context to the incredible story of these two brothers who just decided to tackle an unsolved problem that had plagued engineers and inventors all over the world up to that point. I also enjoyed learning a bit about their process, which laid the groundwork for modern aerospace engineering.

Last, I also enjoyed the moon landing exhibit and the planetary exhibit (which INCLUDED Pluto!).

The entryway to the museum

My favorite exhibit….good stuff as you’d expect about the first flight, but also a lot of background

AND, super cool info on the testing they did, which was revolutionary at the time.

I was so impressed that they designed the wind tunnel because the other experts were wrong.

The Wright Flyer (no peanuts on this flight)

This cracked me up.

The exhibit on the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Lunar Module - since it was only used in the vacuum of space, it didn’t need to be aerodynamic.

It was cool they had this handwritten calendar 1 of the astronauts used to count down the days.

Re-entry capsule.

The enormous rocket engines.

Wearing my Pluto T-shirt in protest, only to find the Pluto display.

Lots of cultural context, as I said, starting with Boldy Going.

And a Tribble!

In the exhibit dedicated to the early fly boys,

Air & Space Museum #2: The Udvar-Hazy Center

This annex to the original museum opened in 2003 and is basically made up of a couple of hangars chock full of aircraft and spacecraft. You can see in the first photo below that the building is remeniscent of the airport it’s located near (Dulles International). The second photo shows the map of where all the aircraft are in the exhibit - it was amazing how much they got into the space. Things were on the ground, in the air, kind of stacked in places. It worked really well and was obviously very well thought out.

They also had an IMAX theater there that showed documentaries during the day and first run movies after hours. We watched the documentary about the James Webb Space Telescope. It was so cool and got me excited again about the possibilities of seeing so much more outside our solar system (I had gotten bored when it was being developed because of the many year delays in launching the telescope - I have a very short attention span).