Last installment of vacation postings

Well, it's taken me long enough, but this is the last post about my vacation. We went to the Air and
Space Museum. It was pretty cool. Here's the whole set.

The first thing we saw was the Moon Rock.


I think the sign is more impressive-looking than the rock. If you can't see then check it on Flickr, I've put a note on it.


Then there were lots of cool things, from hot air balloons to space stuff.


The previous shot was a bad angle. This one lets you see the color better.


This is from the Wright Brothers exhibit. This is not a really a Wright. It's just a dummy.


















Then there was the National Gallery of Art. Here's what I posted of that set. I thought I put more out here, but, I think we were museumed out and I don't think I got a good variety. But here are a few.

The room was really dark, so this photo is a bit grainy. It's also a bit off-center. But I really liked the Mercury statue, so I posted it anyway.




I seemed to like Rodin.










Then, for our next to last night, we had the wonderful privilege of dining with Here Today Gone Tomorrow. We met in Alexandria and she treated us to a great Puerto Rican vegetarian meal and MOJITOS! Is was a really fun evening.


On our last night I finally met my sister, Susie Fairchild. She and Jif treated us to crabs. Yes, that's right crabs. As the batteries died in my camera early on that night this is the only photographic evidence I have of the evening.


Thank you to all of you who've hung in with me while I finally got my act together and got all of this posted.

The Capitol and the Sculpture Garden

We wanted to tour the Capitol so we headed out fairly early in the morning. There was already quite a line when we got to the ticket booth. Our tour was about an hour later so we killed a little time walking around. Here's the set.



I still have a thing for metal grates in the ground.


I like the rainbow effect in this one.


Then we ducked back into the Botanical Garden.




Then we went on our tour. Here is our guide.






That was about for the Capitol for us. Then we walked over to the Sculpture Garden. We saw this on the way. So many pretty water features in DC.


We thought this building was cool.


There were a lot of interesting things in the Sculpture Garden.


This one cracked me up. There will be a lot of younger folks who won't know what this is.




These cubes were all spinning.


This is by Alexander Caulder. We have one of his sculptures in downtown Grand Rapids.


I think this is some kind of aluminum, like the one with the spinning cubes. I'm glad the sun was shining when we saw them.


Not sure if this is supposed to be a political statement. :-)

Flowers!

You know I can't pass up a botanical garden, especially if it's Smithsonian. Ichabod loves plants as much as I do so of course we visited. Here's the entire set of pictures. I'm going to have trouble deciding which ones to post here. I want to show them all, of course.

They had a traveling exhibition of globes. The theme was ecology.

This one had to do with proper roofing materials.


This one was just made of all kinds of stuff. If you click on it you can check out the larger version and the things are easier to see.


I liked this one, too.


And now I'll try to load too many flower pictures here.




This one's kinda hard to make out. It's easier to see in the large size.


This was out of focus, but I like the flower too much to delete it.












They had these metal ones, too. They were cool, but weird.




And, of course, an orchid.