The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly III

Saturday:
Second verse, same as the first, a little bit longer and…about the same. :-D This time we started at the Air and Space Museum, saw the Spirit of St. Louis and some cool exhibits on the Planets. Then we started wandering around DC again, usually with a purpose. I can’t really remember what order we did these in, but we went back to the Art museum to see Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. We just finished studying her. We also saw Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de Benci, which I’ve also examined in a book. It’s a portrait of a bored looking girl, the only Leonardo portrait in America. It was pretty cool—it didn’t look like a painting, but neither like a photograph. Georgia O’Keeffe’s were SO COOL. They were the Jack-in-the-Pulpits, 2-6. They were HUGE. I really like her style of painting. If I painted, which I don’t intend to, my style would be like hers a bit or a lot.

We visited the Botanical Gardens, mostly because we ended up there. That was pretty cool, to see all those different plants in one place, and all different places too—a jungle in one room, and a desert in the next. Needless to say, I loved seeing all the sweet cacti in the desert room. The flowers were GORGEOUS, definitely worth the stop.

We went to the Natural History museum and saw a million animals. I don’t know how God thought of all of them! That was pretty sweet, and then we went to the gems and stones section and saw the Hope diamond, which was spectacular for a diamond but nothing compared to all the sparkling crystals in the next exhibit! Those were seriously magnificent, I don’t care if they’re pretty common, they were huge and sparkly. Some were just giant jewel-type-things, some were plain looking rocks that had a portion cut away to show the crystals coating the inside (never judge a rock by its cover). Some looked like mini sculptures, like something you’d see on the streets of DC (they have these random, abstract sculptures every few blocks). One looked like a painting of a tree, surprisingly enough. I really really liked that section.

After the Natural History museum, we were about done in, so we went back to the American History museum to sit outside and rest like we did at the capitol on Friday. That was quite nice too; we bought an ornament at the last second from the gift shop so that we’ll have something to remember our trip by every year. We stopped at Arlington Cemetery on the way home, it’s a stop on the metro so it was right on our way. It was about to close, so we only stayed 15 minutes and didn’t get very far in at all, but the amount of headstones and crosses was still astounding. Especially when you imagined a man standing in place of each one, that is a multitude of people.

Sunday:
We had only a couple more things we wanted to see: The FDR memorial, and the Thomas Jefferson memorial. Like so many other things on this trip, we stumbled across the George Mason memorial as well. He drafted the Articles of Confederation, which was the pre-government of America that didn’t work out so well. The FDR memorial was quite nice, quotes and waterfalls everywhere. I think he probably would’ve rolled over in his grave if he knew how much it cost, I think it was something like $42 million. I could have that completely wrong, but I think it sounds right.
That was our awesome amazing superlative trip to DC. The weather was wonderful the whole time!! Everything worked perfectly, without even having any major disasters!