Since Dad has the week off, Mom and Dad decided to take a short trip up to DC as part of his Father’s Day present, so he could visit some of the museums. The National Air & Space museum and the National Gallery of Art are 2 of his favorite museums and he wanted to spend some time there and also visit the American Indian museum (the British Museum is still his favorite but that seemed a bit much 😊). Anyway, the trip started off fine as we had good luck with traffic as it was fairly light most of the way up to DC and we arrived pretty much right on time (4 hours from Clayton, NC). Unfortunately, the good luck stopped there… Unbeknownst to us, the Air & Space museum is under going a multi-year renovation and was limited to only guests with timed tickets. Of course, the tickets are free, but all were already given out for the day so we couldn’t even get into the museum. Part of the problem was that the front entryway is getting completely remodeled, so all the doors were closed, forcing everyone to use the back entrance. We are assuming this is probably a safety issue so they have to limit the number of people that visit. (https://airandspace.si.edu/newsroom/press-releases/national-air-and-space-museum-provides-update-renovation-project, https://airandspace.si.edu/about-transformation).
The next stop was the National Gallery of Art, specifically the Impressionist wing with some amazing Monet paintings. Unfortunately we ran into problems here too, as the museum found some mold in this wing of the building and had to shut down the entire section. They temporarily moved a couple of Monet’s smaller pieces downstairs but it was very limited and a little disappointing to say the least. There was a nice portrait on display from Da Vinci that was new and pretty interesting, but portraits aren’t really the most exciting works of art (https://www.nga.gov/visit/renovation-information.html). The last stop on the itinerary was the American Indian museum, but alas it too had most of the main exhibits closed. So overall the trip was a bust, but if nothing else, we did get our exercise for the day as we walked about 11 miles by the time we were done.
The good news was that since we were leaving much earlier than anticipated, we didn’t hit very much rush hour traffic and got back to the hotel by 5pm. We had a nice dinner at Olive Garden and made it over to Ikea and the outlet mall (which hasn’t been updated since we lived there!). The next day we took a slight detour and made it over to Harrisonburg, VA to visit a Lavender Farm that was very nice and had some friendly farm animals. We then drove over to Waynesboro to visit with Aunt Becky and Aunt Courtney (Nana was there too!) as they are making the final preparations for the move to Maryland in a couple of weeks.
The Payne Chronicles 