This week turned out to be a take it easy kind of week. We got up Saturday morning and decided to just stay at the Cherry Hill campground through next Sunday since it appears that this is also one of the better campgrounds relative to Baltimore. We have tickets to see the Orioles play at home next Sunday and the drive from here is estimated to be only 30 minutes up I-95 (it's ok to use the interstate for day trips). So we went ahead and booked our site here for the next week plus.
Saturday we took our first foray on the metro and went over to the Dupont Circle area where the Textile Museum is located.
The current exhibition is on Japanese textiles. The pieces are all reproductions of historical garments and were produced by a famous weaving studio. The historic pieces were examined and recreated by one of the 'living treasure' artisans. It was quite wonderful, although the splendor was occasionally interrupted by the enthusiastic docent waving her arms through the security system proximity sensor, thus setting of an alarm. There was another display of modern pieces which were inspired by pieces from the museum's own collection. We especially liked a piece of installation art made of red nylon thread strung from ceiling to wall forming a sort of twisted tube. Photos were not allowed, so we don't have an image, but it was a lot more marvelous than it sounds.
It is also the area where many of the embassies are so we wandered past several of them on the way to and from the museum. The embassies and pretty well all the other buildings around the area are quite spectacular. Lots of cool stores, we had a nice lunch at a sidewalk cafe and later stopped in a tavern for a drink before returning back to the campground.
Initial Metro conclusion: easy peasy! We bought a couple of SmartTrip cards which allowed us to travel cheaper without worrying about having the exact change every time we boarded a bus or the metro. Throughout the week, we simply charged it up when it was a bit low and away we went! Again... Easy peasy!
After returning to the campsite on Saturday, we decided that our Fuji camera was on the fritz as the zoom had been malfunctioning for awhile and now had basically stopped working. We went over to the local Best Buy and picked up a new Canon.
Sunday was baseball day at the Washington Nationals park. A bit of a bad start, to the day, as we found out the Metro bus to the Metro station runs only hourly on Sunday and we just missed one. So we had a bit of a wait for the next one with the result that we got to the ball park just as the game started and the Yankees were up 1-0 before we got to our seats. All in all a pretty dull game with a few moments of excitement where 3 of the 5 runs scored were via the long ball (LaRoche for the Nationals; Granderson and Cano for the Yankees). Our "home team mojo" was held in check by "favorite team mojo" as the Yankees won 4-1. Sorry Nationals, but that's the way it goes, you should have been playing some other team at this time!
Our trip record is now: Home team 2, Visiting Team 2.
The park itself is quite nice, but they need to work on their PR. I think Homeland Security designed their 'meet and greet' at the gates. Normally at a ball park, they inspect your bags and purses, scan your ticket and then you go through a turnstile where some pleasant person says 'enjoy the game'. Here they inspect your bags and purses and then you go to the turnstile where you have to scan your own ticket (which NO ONE can do, the problem is you can't tell whether it is scanned or not so everyone is waving their tickets frantically under the scanning device) and all the while, to make sure you are having a good time and really feeling the love, the staff member who could have been doing the scanning efficiently is instead standing about 5 feet back with a bull horn screaming at people to 'hurry up'. Already, I was rooting for the Yankees. Heck, I'd have rooted for the Martians at that point.
The ball game was also our first try of the new camera. The zoom is really cool. We were sitting quite high up and way out past third base. Kris took this picture with the zoom. Given the distance we were away and the fact that the ball was traveling at close to 90 mph, it is amazing how clearly the ball was captured...
On Monday we took the metro down to the National Mall. Found a Starbucks inside Barnes and Noble so sat for a bit while the rain settled down. If you go to Starbucks web site and look for locations in Washington DC, you get over 7000 hits!!!
Anyway, we wandered over to the White House visitors centre. Lots of interesting info stuff there. Saw a jigsaw puzzle of the White House in flames (War of 1812) and was tempted to buy it, but decided not to. The original painting is of relatively recent vintage and is exceedingly unattractive; why on earth they would have this in their gift shop is a mystery. Afterwards we walked over to the Museum of American History. We try not to get museumed out by trying to see too much so took in a couple of major exhibits. The Walk through American history exhibit showcased items and/or events that have played significant roles in shaping America; for example, Kermit the Frog...
... an early MacIntosh computer...
... Mohammed Ali boxing gloves...
... Dorothy's ruby slippers from the Wizard of OZ...
... the Woolworths lunch counter where the 1960 sit-down ultimately led to de-segregation...
...not to mention numerous other items in the exhibit. Very interesting. We remember hearing about the sit-in at the time but we lived too far away, were a bit younger and too removed from the situation to truly appreciate what these young people did.
Perhaps one of the more poignant exhibits is the Thomas Jefferson: Paradox of Liberty exhibit where the question is asked "...how can this man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and stood for freedom and liberty continue to own slaves?" Throughout his life Jefferson owned 600 slaves and at the time of his death, out of 117 slaves still in his possession, in his will he freed only seven, all seven of them being his children. At the time of his death his plantation was in debt over $100K and the remaining 110 slaves went on the auction block to be sold to pay off part of this debt. The main part of the exhibit is a statue of Jefferson with the names of the 600 slaves shown on the wall behind him...
The rest of the exhibits illustrates life, as a slave, on his plantation and attempts to follow the lives of the children he fathered.
Not far along, just off the Mall, on Pennsylvania Ave is the Canadian Embassy...
We went up onto the plaza to view the absolutely fantastic Bill Reid bronze casting of his famous Spirit of Haida Quai aka "The Black Canoe"...
This is something that every Canadian who ventures to Washington DC should/must go and see!
After viewing the sculpture, we ventured into the Canadian Embassy where we were stopped by a "guard" who wanted to know our business. Brian said we wanted to use the restrooms, but the guard said they had no public restrooms... these words were barely out of her mouth before Kris slapped down our Canadian passports and exclaimed "... you should have if we have these!...". The guard looked at our passports and directed us to a one room museum highlighting the War of 1812 (which, by the way, does not mention the burning of the American White House or offer the ugly puzzle for sale). After looking at the displays we wandered down a hallway and found restrooms.... lesson... don't let someone deny you, as a Canadian citizen, the right to pee in a Canadian Embassy restroom, and by our nature, the toilets were indeed dual flush! the separate solitudes, in another sense ;-0
On Tuesday we took the metro south of the city to Alexandria. Not sure what to do or where to go upon departing the metro, we were surprised and happy to see a free trolley from the metro station to the waterfront along historic King Street (about 20 blocks). Very nice! We took the trolley right down to the waterfront, wandered around a bit before settling on the outside patio of the Chart House Restaurant for a terrific lunch. Brian had a Crab Cake and Shrimp platter while Kris had an Avocado, Mango, Crab Stack. After lunch we wandered around the historic district for a couple of hours including the Torpedo Factory (really was a torpedo factory and is now a place where there are working artists and their studio/galleries) before heading back to the campground via the metro.
Wednesday was haircut and the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum to start the day. We sat in on a talk given by Hari Jones, the curator to the Museum. What an electric and passionate speaker. His talk challenged the prevailing general academic wisdom on the roles that Black/African Americans played as soldiers in the Civil War. What a treat, not to mention an eye opener! The statue of the memorial outside the museum lists the names of some 200k+ Black soldiers who served for the Union in the Civil War....
Later, after having our hair cut and coiffed it was back down to the National Mall and the National Museum of Art where we checked out a special exhibit on watercolours and a couple of other exhibits, the gift shops and the cafeteria for a nice late lunch before calling it a day. Kris was gratified to see that one of the watercolours had a very blobby foreground, something akin to her own artistic efforts.
Thursday was our day to visit the Library Of Congress and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Once again using the Metro, we started the day at a Starbucks coffee just down the street from the Library Of Congress. It was sort of cool to see a whack of young folks with their conference badges for the National Young Leaders Conference. As we left Starbucks we saw some poor guy get pulled over by a kzillion cops. It appeared that he happened to be from Wisconsin pulling a small trailer and that it (the small trailer) may have caused some concern. Good thing we didn't try pulling our wee travel trailer that close to the capitol region!!!
We signed up for a tour of the Library of Congress and that turned out to be very interesting. After the tour we went over to the Madison Building and applied for Library of Congress Reader Cards which will allow us access to all the research facilities of the library. WAAAY COOOL!... if and when we want to use them, that is!
After obtaining our official cards we took the elevator up to the sixth floor of the Madison Building for a nice lunch with a decent view around the city.
Friday was the Renwick Gallery (American Crafts Museum) where we saw some phenomenal examples of American crafts, including woodworking and quilting amongst others...
... followed by a return visit to the National Art Gallery where we wandered around some of the galleries displaying the likes of Van Gogh, Vermeer, Leonardo, Rembrandt, etc (just to drop a few names). Wonderful!!!
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