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DC, Sightseeing, and Marching (Apr 28, 2017)
After sleeping in and catching up on some reading this morning, Sharon and I got our morning breakfast here at the hotel buffet and caught the shuttle to the Metro. We ended up retracing a lot of my steps from yesterday morning, so I didn’t take a lot of pictures today.
After revisiting the corner where we stood so long in January (hard to recognize now!), we walked the next block over to the entrance of the Air and Space Museum. But bad news! Hoards of buses and what looked like teenagers in line to get (or pick up) tickets. We decided not to fight the crowds at this time and so moved on.
We revisited the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. This time I got a couple of good pictures I wasn’t able to capture yesterday. The pyramid was a great one. I like patterns, and this offered them in spades from every different angle. I thought it was fascinating (I have more pictures than you’ll see here!).
Also here is a great fountain with six large water jets. I noticed yesterday that the water pressure varied, so the distance the water goes changes from barely 6 feet out all the way to crossing in the middle of the large pool. I took a series where you can see one of the jets moving to the right, eventually joining with the others. Very cool, and a great place to sit.
From there we went to the Smithsonian visitor center again, spending some time in the garden. The weather was warm and sunny again today, so it was really pleasant to sit outside.
We decided to find the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We’d heard that there were timed tickets there and we probably wouldn’t be able to get into the main exhibition, but that was really OK with us. We didn’t want to spend all day there. We ended up doing a kind of walk-about, but we finally found the place.
After getting past the security check, we approached the information desk. The fellow there told us the areas we could get into without a ticket and that we were just in time to get a personal tour if we wanted one. This was unusual because the museum is normally self-guided, but they do one or two guided tours a day. Yay. (BTW, timed tickets are free, but are needed to keep the exhibition space from getting too crowded.)
The exhibit the tour visited was “Some Were Neighbors.” This told the story of how the holocaust wasn’t just the Nazi’s and the Jews, but many, many bystanders–or “onlookers”–who went along with the persecution. It’s truly a a scary story, and unfortunately not too difficult to see the same tendency in many societies today, including in the good ol’ U.S. of A.!
After leaving this museum, we decided to get something to eat, so we headed back to the Sculpture Garden where there’s a cafe. While we were eating, we decided to skip our planned visit to the National Art Museum for today and just head back to the hotel.
I got a nice shot of the Capitol building to finish out my picture taking today. If you look closely, you might be able to see the bird I didn’t know I’d captured. 🙂
Tomorrow’s the march! We didn’t get anything to make signs with, so we’ll just contribute by being bodies in the crowd. This way I should be able to concentrate on getting some pictures of the crowd, too.
Here are the some of the few pictures I got today.
