Saturday April 16th 2016

Today my focus was on visiting the Air & Space Museum and the Capital end of the Mall. I drove to the Metro today since parking is free on the weekend. This saves the half hour or so on the bus. The museum opens at 10am and I was there right on time.

US Capitol building west side. The construction staging around the dome is visible.

It has been a number of years since I visited the Air & Space museum on the mall. My last couple of visits were to the Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy facility at Dulles Airport which opened in 2003. This was my opportunity to see what has changed at the National Mall facility.

Spirit of St Louis

Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia

Wright Flyer

Most of the big artifacts are the same. It’s not easy to change out aircraft and space craft. They may have put in some new items, but it’s hard to tell. Some of the galleries need a refresh of the narrative. For example, one display wall describes all of the commercial jet airliners through the 1980s. There are a lot of Boeing and Airbus airliners built since the 80s that have not been added. Yet a few feet away is an Airbus A320 cockpit mock-up fight simulation. So they’re trying.

Italian Folgore 202 and US P-51D

SBD-6 Dauntless and other aircraft

There are new galleries on Moon photographs, Time & Navigation and Moving Beyond Earth which deals with the shuttle program and space station missions. These captured my attention better than some of the older exhibits. The Time & Navigation gallery was particularly interesting. It showed the evolution of navigation from following the stars to the GPS era and time from the sun dial to atomic clocks.

I spent about two hours in the museum. I toured every gallery, but primarily took pictures in the galleries that hadn’t been significantly updated since I last visited. The new galleries got the majority of my focus.

Azalea in a pot at the Botanic Garden

My next stop on the Mall was at the United States Botanic Garden. This facility is the home of rare and endangered plants. This weekend is the last two days of a special focus on orchids. Perhaps for that reason there were more people viewing the gardens than I expected. I went a little crazy with my camera. I took pictures of anything that had a color other than green.

Orchid on exhibit at the Botanic Garden

Closeup of a blossom

From the Botanic Garden I walked in front of the Capital over to Union Station to catch the Metro back to my car in College Park MD. I got back to the campground about 3:30. It was a short day but I saw a lot of interesting stuff. Tomorrow I’ll focus on the Natural History Museum.