We did travel to Washington, D.C. to introduce our daughter to the wonderful things in the District.  Washington, D.C. is one of the great museum towns.  We were able to get into the Smithsonian's new Steven Udvar-Hazy Center, a 300-yard long hangar packed with historic aircraft.  The Center, at Dulles airport, is a 20-mile trek out of town, but worth the effort.  The crowds were huge and the parking lot full.

The original Air and Space Museum features a wonderful Wright Brothers exhibit with the Flyer resting on the floor for the first time in many decades.  That is worth a second visit -- or third.

Although my 8-year-old daughter finds art "boring,"  we spent time in my favorite museum -- the National Art Gallery.  I like this building as much for its design as its art collection, which is amazing.  And, because there were few visitors to the National this time, we had many rooms to ourselves.  That took me back to my first visits to the Gallery in the early 1970s when there were few tourists during the Winter.  I could spend a day at the National -- and did -- without bumping into crowds.

Washington, D.C. now is a year-round tourist destination, but tourists have preferences.  The Museum of American History was crowded as was the Museum of Natural History and Air and Space, but the Museum of African Art and Hirschhorn galleries were about empty.  The Lincoln Monument attracted mobs but not the Roosevelt Memorial -- a beautiful installation -- nor the Jefferson, a trek around the tidal basin.  The National Zoo was packed.  We parked far down the hill at the bottom of the zoo and walked it in reverse. 

The unhappy part of Washington, D.C. these days is security.  Every museum has bag checks and most have security gates to detect metal.  There is an unintended consequence about this, however.  One can see clearly from a distance which museums are crowded based on the length of lines waiting to get in.  That helped us more than once to change directions and go elsewhere.

Back to work.