Bad Field Trip

Our first of two days in DC, the forecast called for the potential of some morning rain - so we decided to make this our Smithsonian Day.   We planned on hitting three separate musuems during the day (Natural History, American History and Air and Space).  Turns out it was sunny and beautiful all day - so we had no need for any rain gear that I lugged around.

After some morning complaining between Brett and Jake about bed hogging, we hit the hotel breakfast buffet hard before hitting the Metro station near the hotel.   The Natural History and American History both had interesting exhibits and you can't beat the price.  However not everybody in our party was excited about this leg of our trip.  A few hours into our visit Brett declared "this is not a vacation, this is a bad field trip".

All the sites were crawling with Massachusetts folks and we even ran into people we knew from our home town.  I was also surprised how many families were there with their toddler/grade school kids.  I think the DC experience is mostly lost on that age group but it is apparently lost on my 8th grader as well...

Overall I enjoyed the Air and Space the most of the three Smithsonian's that we visited that day.  They had a wide variety of commercial and military aircraft there.  Although I was a bit surprised on how dated most of the movies were in the little theatre displays by the exhibits.  There was one that was narrated/hosted by Willard Scott that must have been made 35 years ago.  They also had an exhibit on  satellite technology that was suppose to impress me on how I could zoom in towards my house.  Of course Google Earth can do it 20x better right from desktop.  

An impressive thunderstorm rolled in (along with tornado warning) right before we were going to go our for dinner - so we stayed in and had dinner at the hotel restaurant.  A good decision for everybody but my wallet.