Trip Day 2: Pictures of You

Since we didn't have any tours scheduled on Wednesday, we decided to start off by going to some of the Smithsonian museums. Our first challenge was figuring out the Metro system. Union Station was a block from our hotel which was nice. Another nice thing is that some of the subway stops are actually named for the nearby attractions. We bought our week passes and were on our way, map in hand at all times.

I was surprised to find that almost all the museums in DC are free. I guess since it's government property they aren't allowed to charge for admission. We started with the Natural History museum. I think the one in LA is better. DC has an elephant in the main hall, LA has battling dinosaur skeletons. No contest there. We went upstairs and saw the Hope diamond and had a chance to pet Madagascar hissing cockroaches, but Cyndi wanted no part of that. Go figure.

We found out that the American History museum with all the pop culture memoribilia was closed until next year, but some of the items were being displayed at the Air and Space museum. We walked around the space exhibits and saw items like the puffy shirt from Seinfeld.

We made a trip through the Modern Art Gallery then rode the metro over to the Portrait Gallery. This was one of our favorite stops. They had the only collection of presedential portraits outside of the White House, and also had lots of interesting photos and paintings of both the famous and not so famous.

It was getting late so we went down the street to Hard Rock Cafe for dinner. We then went back to the hotel and air conditioning until it got dark. In the evening we walked down the street a few blocks to get some shots of the Capitol lit up at night.