Washington, D.C. 2015

Friday, January 9th

Waiting with our friends on the Lynchburg Train Station platform to board the Northeast Regional to D.C., Gretchen and I accomplished one of our goals for 2015; we saw the sun rise! After checking in at the Hampton Inn, we ate lunch and headed to the Supreme Court Building. It is amazing the Court never had a home of its own until 1935, 146 years after it was founded! It is a beautiful home, however, and we got to attend a docent lecture in the courtroom which was informative and really well done.

Gretchen, Emily, David, Laurie and Gary approaching the Supreme Court Building

Our next stop was the Folger Shakespeare Museum next door which houses the largest collection of Shakespeare's folios in the world....surprised us! We learned a folio was a folded document on which the play was written for publication. Also, we found out that each actor was given his part on a roll of paper with just the preceding line of the actor's part before each of the lines in his part. Hence, this is how we came to call an actor's part a role. In the future, we'll have to try to attend a play in the Museum's theater. We ended a busy afternoon by dropping by the Library of Congress to see a copy of Magna Carta which was on display.

Dinner at the Cure Bar & Bistro was excellent.

Saturday

The day dawned chilly and stayed chilly but it did not deter our valiant troupe. First stop was the National Women in the Arts Museum, an institution founded in 1981 dedicated to celebrating women’s achievements in the visual, performing, and literary arts. The current exhibit Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea was extensive, very interesting and well done. One of the sculptures In the museum is pictured below. When Laurie looked at it she immediately said, "Now that is really sensual", and indeed it did represent sex!

Compliments of Representative Goodlatte, our next stop was a tour of the White House which was a first for Gretchen and me. We stopped by the renovated White House Visitors Center and then headed across the street for our 12:30 p.m. tour. The tour is quite nice and includes the first and second floors of the central section of the White House; winding past the Vermeil, China and Library on the first floor before proceeding up the stairs to the East, Green, Blue, Red and State Dining Rooms. Leaving via the front door, it was hard to imagine how the recent fence jumper got all the way across the lawn and through the front door before being apprehended.

We had planned to have lunch at Founding Farmers but upon arrival, we realized reservations are required for lunch as well as dinner so we had to ad lib. Lunch at a nearby restaurant will be remembered by David not for its food but for a credit card lost and found! Our afternoon stop was the National Geographic Museum to see the exhibit Food: Our Global Kitchen. The exhibit covered global food production and delivery and posed the question of how production will keep up with global population gains in the next century. It was an intestering show but not the caliber (IMHO) as most of the other ones we have seen at the museum. There was also an exhibit on Spinosaurus, a recently discovered dinosaur in the league of T Rex but one that hunted prey in shallow seas.

Spinosaurus

We finished the day with drinks and dinner at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant around the corner from our hotel we discovered during a snow storm on a previous trip.

 

Sunday

It was warmer today! The plan was to go to see the Pentagon 911 Memorial. However, since Arlington National Cemetary was on the way, Emily wanted to stop there and see if she could find her Uncle's grave. He was a Korean War pilot who was declared MIA after his plane was shot down over North Korea.

Emily and David at her uncle's grave. The guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

We decided not to go to the Pentagon Memorial opting to defer that to next year in hopes of coupling it with a Pentagon tour. So we headed to the National Mall to see an exhibit at the Hirshhorn. But first, we stopped at the National Museum of the American Indian for lunch...always a treat with many culinary options derived from Indian cultures to explore. The exhibit at the Hirshhorn, Days of Endless Time, was fabulous. The medium was a series of 14 musical video shows designed to suspend time....to give the viewer a respite from the harried lifestyles we lead. It worked...many times Gretchen and I found ourselves just sitting, mesmerized by the visual content and music...not wanting to move on in case we'd miss something.

Notes

Our troupe walked over 48,000 steps (~22 miles) this weekend. This put me in third place on the Bolton family Fitbit rankings for the week, a lofty perch from which I am sure to fall!

Many thanks to our in-house guide. Gary, you always do a great job organizing the trip and guiding us around the the city. Emily, thanks for you suggestions of museums and restaurants to visit.

Lastly, can you image two video walls, two stories high by 10 yds wide connected by a video ceiling 10 yds wide by 30 yds long? It is quite impressive, part of the entrance to a new apartment complex. We had to stop and play every time we passed by!

 

 

Great weekend my friends, looking forward to next year!

 

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