DC

Our end point for the mad dash across the country was Washington, DC. Not because we wanted to see DC, but because we got the chance to celebrate two of our friends getting married. During our time in DC we stayed in the parking lot of our other friends’ apartment building. We spent most of our time there catching up with friends and relaxing, but we did do one day of heading downtown to look at museums on Monday. 

All of the Smithsonian Museums along the mall are free. We started with the Air and Space Museum. Half of the museum was closed for renovations but there was still a lot to see. We spent two hours there looking at life-sized spacecrafts and learning about navigation. We were going to check out the other Air and Space Museum by Dulles on our way out of town but were deterred by the $15 parking. What can I say, we're cheap. 

After getting lunch from a food truck on the mall we moved on to the Natural History Museum. Kathleen's highlight was seeing the outbreaks exhibit opened last year for the centennial of the 1918 Flu Epidemic. It was interesting, but as Andreas pointed out in Air and Space: exhibits can be less interesting when you already have a degree or two in them. We knew we weren't going to learn much. But it was fun to see how the information was presented. 

 

Next we briefly looked at the geology area, followed by the mammals, before the museum closed and we had to leave. The second time we've closed down a museum! There was still a lot we wanted to see, but oh well. 

Lots of people recommended the portrait gallery to us, so even though we aren't big art people we ended the day there. It was interesting and we appreciated the amount of information they had about each of the artists but we were starting to get museum-ed out. 

Overall, we barely scratched the surface of DC. We could have spent another day or two looking around but leaving the kids in the RV all day wasn't a great option, and we were getting tired of living in a parking lot. We were ready to get back into slightly more remote areas.