Hi everybody!
As promised, this is a post about the second day spent in Washington D.C. Our AirBNB was less than a block away from Big Bear Cafe, which I grew a small obsession with in the few days we were there. We ran into a Farmers Market while getting iced coffee before a day exploring museums.
As I mentioned in my last posts, and I can touch on in a post about trip planning, when we were planning sightseeing we made one day primarily outdoors and one indoors in case weather was bad. We lucked out with weather the whole trip and kicked off our second day with the Jefferson Memorial near the Tidal Basin.
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One of my favorite things about DC is, in terms of monuments, you can see one no matter where you are. The Washington Monument was the first one we saw when we arrived and we used it as the centerpiece whenever we ventured off the National Mall. DC has an intimacy I'm not used to in Chicago and it seems to be much more my pace.
At the top of my list of things we did on this trip was the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Inside the museum, you receive a small booklet of a victim of the Holocaust and read about their story. The museum starts you on the fourth floor and takes you through time as you work your way down to the first floor. The fourth floor is centered around Germany rising to power.
Each floor takes you around the floor, down two hallways to the stairs, then down to the next floor. On the third floor is focused on the concentration camps and mistreatment of Jewish people, including a mock train car you can walk in, bunks, and a door of a gas chamber.
One of the hallways contains the Auschwitz shoes.
Turning down the hallway it is in is not expected and, to me, it was the most overwhelming piece of the museum.
To lighten the mood afterwards, we visited the Museum of American History with the intent of seeing Dorothy's Ruby Slippers and Prince's guitar. But, the guitar was off display. If you like pop culture and are in the area, this is a must-see. It's suitable for all ages and there's something for anybody. Aside from the ruby slippers, my highlight was the Batmobile. I've been a huge fan of Batman since I was a child, so it was a cool, unexpected, fangirl moment.
Next up was the American Museum of Art. This is home to the presidential portraits as well as halls and galleries of a spectrum of other beautiful pieces. One of my favorites you'll see below is a collection of floorboards from gymnasiums in Chicago schools.
This picture is kind of junk, but here's Free Throw.
I don't have any photos from it, but we also visited the National Museum of the American Indian on a whim, but it was one of my trip highlights. Through the different floors, we learned about folktales and history. On the main floor, there was live music. It was beautiful.
After we went through three museums, it was about closing time for the rest of them, so we biked toward the National Mall to see the White House up close for the first time, and see the monuments lit up at night.
The National Mall at night and DC at night has a vibe to it that's very comfortable. It's very calming because everybody is just hanging out on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or around the Reflecting Pool. Going through all of these photos was a nice remembrance of the trip and all of the wonderful feelings that came with it.
The next post will be our final day in DC. There were highlights from each day, but as a whole the last day of our trip was my favorite because we visited the Capitol building, stumbled into the Museum of Natural History with time to spare, and, the motivation behind the trip, saw Bloc Party perform their album Silent Alarm backwards. More on that later. :)
Thanks for reading!
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