A day on the town

One of the wonderful things about being in the military 

and one of the rare benefits of having to move all the time

is getting to be a perpetual tourist.  

I figure we have two to three years to be "tourists in our hometown"

and try as I might, I never get everything done that is on our to do list.

So, this week, while the older two were off doing their various activities

(Key leader camp and a drill competition)

Grant and Julia accompanied me to DC.

The mall was filled with white tents housing the weekend's Earth Day celebration.

We stopped to check out the displays.

All were interesting, but NASA was our favorite.

I imagine that one of the reasons why we never get our entire "to do" list done 

is because we like to revisit some of our favorite spots.  

Grant hadn't been to the African Art museum, so Julia and I enjoyed showing him the sights
and noticing items that we hadn't noticed on our first trip.

I love finding the hidden, quiet places in DC,

like the Moongate Garden just behind the Smithsonian Castle.

I'd never noticed it before.

It made a lovely resting place, someplace that felt like it belonged to us since there was no one else there.

The kids ran back and forth across the little bridges tempting fate, 

 fortunately no one fell in.

Both the African Art museum and the Sackler Art gallery (Asian art) also count as hidden gems.

Located off the mall, behind the castle and the moongate garden,

not as many tourists know about them,

which kind of makes me happy because we're not fighting crowds to see all of the displays.

This was the first time that any of us had been to the Sackler 

and we found plenty of wonderful things that captured our imagination.

Then to top it all off...

we found a secret passage way.

Okay, so it's not really secret, I mean there were signs pointing the way to anyone who cared to look.

But the underground passage from Sackler to the Freer was new to us.

(Somehow, underground passages always seem so much cooler than any other way.)

Julia and I were excited to show Grant the Peacock room.  

I shared with him the story of the room, 

taking the same type of creative license as I did when I wrote about it in an earlier post.

I think Grant loved it as much as we did.