Life in Scribbletown Love Among the Sticky.

Good morning! I have the house all to myself today – a rare and beautiful thing – and much to do so I’ll chop up the DC trip into three posts. I’ll use Dusty’s journal entries (spelling corrected) to open each section. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for her keeping this journal, I probably would have forgotten what we did. I haven’t downloaded all the photos yet but I hope to have that done soon.

Monday, April 6 2009

On the train to Washington DC. I cut out paper dolls and read. I also listened to music and drew.

This was Dusty’s first train ride. One of the very nice things about working where I do is that it’s a block from the Amtrak station. I parked the car in my office parking lot and we walked a block to catch the train. Which was on time.

It was a chilly, rainy day but we had a full agenda. In addition to generally seeing the sights, Dusty wanted to earn a patch (actually a series of patches) for visiting DC. This required making certain stops at certain museums and landmarks. We almost did it – got about 96% accomplished.

Like I said, it was raining off and on and guess who forgot to bring their umbrella? Yep. Dusty had hers but I’d forgotten BOTH of mine. Oi. We checked into the hotel in Chinatown and walked the couple blocks to the National Mall under her umbrella.

At the Air and Space Museum: we went in the space lab. Also, we saw the Wright Brother’s plane. I touched a sliver of a moon rock.

What Dusty doesn’t tell you is that we had to wait in a hideously long line, in the on-again-off-again rain, for about half an hour just for the priveledge of having my small bag searched for explosives and throwing stars. Fortunately, I left those in the hotel room. We finally got in and saw the Apollo capsule, various types of planes (mostly military and beyond my scope of knowledge and interest), and then found the space exhibit and, next door, the Wright Brother’s exhibit.

Here is the line for the Skylab Orbital Workshop. You can walk through a cross section and see how astronauts lived while in space. There is their shower, there’s the toilet, there’s the table of food packets.

Here’s the Wright plane with Orville or Wilbur lying in it:

Here’s Dusty touching the moon rock:

We had some lunch in the non-McD’s cafe in the museum and then headed over to the art quadrant.

At Hirshorn Museum: It is shaped like a doughnut. We saw lots of sculptures. And a few paintings.

Yes, the museum had three floors filled with sculptures. And paintings. But mostly sculptures. I spotted a few Rodins and Calders. We inadvertently ended up in an area that was “closed” though there had been nothing to indicate this. A large surly female guard made us leave the area. Immediately. What. Ever.

We went down to the gift shop (we hit every single one throughout our stay) and found a wonderful (and pricey) gift for Red’s birthday.

As we left, I took this picture of Dusty in front of a scary spider scupture. Again, another high-strung guard was yelling at people not to lean on it. If you put something OUTSIDE, you better be prepared for people to touch it, lean on it, even (if you’re a kid) crawl on it. Should go without saying. Otherwise, put up a barrier.

Freer Museum: We saw the peacock room.

By now, we were getting tired. Foot sore. My crappy sneakers were not holding up (I later bought some gel arch supports which helped). We drug ourselves into the Freer Gallery, mainly to see Whistler’s Peacock Room:

I’d hoped to look around more, but Dusty was a bit fatigued. I have no idea if photography was allowed in that room but, since there was no guard present (too busy riffling through people’s bags and purses), I took one. So there! I’d wanted Dusty to know a bit more about the history of the Peacock Room and how it got to the Freer, who Freer was, but there’s plenty of time for that later. That’s the beauty of the internet.

Natural History Museum. We saw the Hope Diamond. We took pictures of lots of “stuffed” animals.

This is where Dusty really wanted to go. It was another long wait. But at least the clouds had parted (naturally, after I bought an umbrella at the Air and Space Museum). After the requisite search, we strolled around and I think saw almost every inch of the place. The only downside was simply the immense amount of people there. They weren’t particularly obnoxious or rude, it was just hard to work against the sheer numbers of them.

But, we saw all the mammals, the dinosaurs, the under sea creatures, fossils, etc. Hit the gift shop and took the circulator bus to the hotel. After resting up a bit, we had a lovely dinner with Essaywriter and went back and watched two episodes of Planet Earth. My aunt gifted the extended family with the book, the DVD set and the “Making Of” dvd. We took the dvds along with us, making my computer not entirely useless. Dusty loved them.

This one’s for Lass:

End of Part One.