Portraits and Pilots, Smithsonian Museums, Washington, DC

With a steady rain settling over DC this morning, we decided to focus our touring on indoor activities. A short drive to the Greenbelt subway station allowed us to catch the Green Line to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Portrait Gallery in downtown DC. The museum offers a free locker program, so we left my backpack and our coats and spent the next hour viewing historical paintings and portraits. They have the best collection of presidential portraits outside the White House, and their civil war paintings were excellent as well. The kids can only handle so much “culture”, so after an hour we walked next door to a restaurant for brick-oven pizza (it was excellent but spendy).

After lunch we took the subway two stops down to the Air and Space Museum. It was pretty crowded on a Saturday afternoon, but we enjoyed looking at the space modules – John Glen’s Mercury Friendship 7 Capsule where he became the first American in space, the Gemini IV mission which included Edward White’s first space walk, and the Apollo 11 Command Module when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. The rest of the exhibits were jammed with people so we watched an IMAX 3D movie on the sun (based upon data from the twin STEREO satellites) and then an interesting presentation on Black Holes in the Einstein Planetarium. We decided to return another day to view the other exhibits with less crowds.

For dinner last night Teressa made chili, and then we settled in to watch the movie American Treasure. We had all seen it before, but it was much more fun watching this time and recognizing all the locations – The Old North Church in Boston, Wall Street in New York City, and the Capitol and monuments in DC. We'll continue our own tour of the monuments tomorrow!