Whitney and I love a good museum, especially when visiting a new part of the world. It allows us to get a base of reference for what we’ll see in that country. The Smithsonian was a bit different for me because, throughout my life, I had frequently heard of cool things that were heading off to the Smithsonian Museum, and in my younger days I figured its storage room must look a lot like the final scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark… giant wooden crates being wheeled into a huge warehouse that stretched on as far as the eye could see.
In my later years, I learned that the Smithsonian comprises 21 themed museums, most of which are located along the National Mall in Washington, DC. We’ve never visited the East Coast of the US other than Florida, so the opportunity to visit the museums had not come up, but when our cruise from the UK to return to Canada for the summer ended in Boston, we took the opportunity to take a short hop to DC to check off this bucket list item.
This is a pretty short post since we were mainly focused on the single task of seeing the museums, but we’re now back in Asia for the remainder of the year after a quiet two months in Canada, so we’ll hopefully have some interesting locations to share.
By the way, some Canadians may be curious about our visiting the US with the current administration’s insulting views about our country. Believe me, we did think about it, but we had booked this cruise a year in advance, and since there wasn’t a good alternative to reach North America by sea that didn’t have us going through the US, we decided to continue on.
Boston
With the cruise ending in Boston, we took the opportunity to learn more about the city that’s known as the cradle of the American Revolution. The best way to do that is by following the Freedom Trail: a walking tour, which, as its website proclaims, is a unique collection of museums, churches, meeting houses, burying grounds, parks, a ship, and historic markers that tell the story of the American Revolution and beyond.
Washington, DC
The great thing about the Smithsonian museums and most major attractions in DC is that they’re FREE! Three of the museums are so popular that you need to go online and make free timed-entry bookings (National Air and Space Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and Smithsonian National Zoo). With the other museums you can just show up to enter. We couldn’t visit all 17 of the Smithsonian museums during the week we had in DC (many of them could easily have spanned 2 or 3 days if we had the time), not to mention the other sites we wanted to check out, so we prioritized 5 museums to visit, with the following being some of the highlights for us:
DC is chock full of other great museums and sites, with these among our highlights:
We’re now back in Asia, currently in Japan, with a road trip of the fall colours coming up, so watch for that post in a few weeks.
