Day 6 - today we are going to see the Capitol Building and some of the museums along the south side of the Mall.
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| Capitol Building (front) |
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| Capitol Building (rear) |
We headed to our Representative Bill Flores's office in the Rayburn building just south of the Capitol - about a 10 minute walk from our hotel. There we met up with his staff (Bill was in session) and an intern named Peter took us on a personal tour of the Capitol building. It was nice skipping the huge line and most of the big crowds to see the most important stuff. The tour was a little over an hour long and we saw the old Supreme Court room, several rotundas and statues, and learned a lot about the history of the Capitol. We saw the statues of Sam Houston and Stephen F Austin (every state gets two) and Shellie got to find the two Montana statues - Charles Russell and Jeannette Rankin. I also learned that Sam Houston is the only person to ever be Governor of two states - Tennessee and Texas. The Ronald Reagan statue has pieces of the Berlin Wall embedded in the pedestal. We had passes to see the Senate and House in action, but the security line was supposedly one and a half hours for each, so we said, "No, You" and left to get on about the rest of our day.
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| Old Supreme Court room |
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Bix showing the back of a $2 bill with the same painting
you can see on the wall behind him |
We walked a couple of blocks to the National Botanical Gardens, a combination of indoor and outdoor plants - you can wander through various climate zones from desert to rainforest and see a lot of interesting plants. We spent only about 20-30 minutes at this stop before we needed to get lunch.
For lunch we were recommended to eat at the American Indian Museum and we will not be re-recommending this. Super duper expensive and though some of the dishes were OK (Indian taco, tamales) the rest was not to our taste or budget. We blasted from there to go to the National Air and Space Museum.
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| Apollo-Soyuz |
We started our trip on Saturday with the Apollo 11 50th anniversary show and now we finally mad it to the museum. The kids went in the flight simulator right away since the line was short ($8-12 each depending on the simulator). Shellie and I looked around at the first floor exhibits while they did that. I loved the Apollo-Soyuz mission as a kid and made a model of it, but they had a
life-sized version on the museum floor. They also had many rockets and missiles on display, some looked to be 30-50 feet tall. They had a recreated Skylab you could walk through. Another highlight for me was seeing the Kitty Hawk exhibit - how they did their trials and took first flight in 1903. They had a full size plan in that display as well. It's amazing comparing that to the vast array of World War I planes we saw as models in the Pentagon tour, and that all happened only one decade later. We spent about an hour and a half at the museum and could have gone longer - they have many IMAX movies to watch as well.
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| Wright Brothers' Plane |
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| Missiles |
Our last stop was the Hirshhorn museum - a circular art gallery next to the Air and Space Museum. They have mainly specialty/odd pieces along with a few more famous paintings (Dali, Magritte, Miro). I wanted to see Pickett's Charge by Mark Bradford as shown on 60 minutes. But we also saw some other strange stuff. Like the pictures below that I took of the lifelike Giant and the huge rock with a face smashing a car.
The rest of the day we spent relaxing at the hotel until we went to dinner two blocks for our hotel at The Dubliner (more Irish pub food). My Shepherd's Pie was very good, the kids had Steak and Fries, and Shellie had beef stew, while we listened to a guy sing Irish folk songs.
Tomorrow we are headed to Philadelphia for the day.
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