Smithsonian Museum Marathon

20 May 2010

We’re back in Washington D.C. now for the rest of our holiday, and have spent the last three days exploring the many museums that D.C. has to offer, including the vast array of Smithsonian offerings.

On our first day, we started off by popping in to the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage to say hello to some folk from my Smithsonian intern days. Then we made a beeline to the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), where we spent a good few hours in the galleries on the Golden Age of Flight, jet aviation, exploring planets and the universe, as well as playing in the interactive ‘How Things Fly’ exhibit (we didn’t quite shove any kids out the way to have a go though it was a close call). Some of the galleries at NASM were closing early due to a reception, so we spent another hour at the National Gallery of Art instead, where we caught a temporary exhibition featuring photographs from Allen Ginsberg’s personal snapshots. To finish off we circumnavigated the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) to marvel at the architecture, which is very organic, all curves and waves and water features.

On our second day, we started out at the National Museum of American History, where we saw such national treasures as the ruby slippers from the Wizard of Oz, the Star Spangled Banner, and Julia Child’s Kitchen, as well as taking the time to immerse ourselves in two exhibitions about the American Presidency in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular, fully quenching the husband’s thirst for American presidential history. We then went on to the National Museum of Natural History, where we visited the new exhibition on evolution, as well as ‘marvelling’ at the Hope Diamond and spending some time looking at dinosaurs, fossils, gems and minerals.

On our final day we went back to NASM to see the last couple of galleries that had been closed early on our previous trip (and the husband was very please that he got to see a Cray 1 - if that doesn’t mean anything to you, that’s fine, it doesn’t mean much to me either, he was pleased anyway). We then completed our Smithsonian museum marathon at the National Postal Museum, via another quick stop at NMAI. I love the Postal Museum. So much so, in fact, that I think it deserves its own post, so I won’t say anything more about it just now.