East Coast Trip - Part 6 - DC Natural History Museum

After lunch Doug and I headed over to the Natural History Museum:

Once again we started our tour up on the top floor and worked our way down. We weren't sure what part of the museum Mike, Nicole and Josh were so we just started in the gems and mineral exhibit...I get kind of excited around pretty rocks and stuff so I took a lot of pictures. Here are a few:

Lava...neat

Jade

Giant slab of Iron ore

Gold!!

Platinum

Silver

Nature just being beautiful

This Quartz cluster must have been 5 feet tall

Doug quite impressed by these crystals

One ginormous perfect crystal ball

Oooooo, awwww....soooo shiny

And the exhibit ended with the Hope Diamond...it was very pretty:

Looks heavy

By this point we had made contact with Mike and the others, they were resting in the bones section of the museum. Apparently the dinosaur exhibit was under renovations until 2019. The museum did have two dinos for display but the rest where gone. So we walked through the bones section and the Egyptian exhibit.

Whale Bones

Sea Turtle

These guys were working on some other fossils

Mummies

 

 Then we headed down a floor towards the mammal exhibit...we passed a cool Korean art exhibit on the way.

Silk Tapestry...very cool it was about 10 feet by 8 feet

Then we found the stuffed animals...always interesting seeing different kinds of animals from all over the world, even though they are all dead....

 

Loved this one, it was the size of a horse

Here...kitty kitty

This Australian Dingo looked like our Saydie-dog

What does the fox say?

 

Rodents of Unusual Size

We finished our tour of the museum in the under the sea section. They had two giant squids and a bunch of other cool underwater creatures.

More Whale bones

 

Big squids

I found Nemo!!

Me in front of a giant jelly fish model

Then we met back up with Mike, Nicole and Josh down in the gift shop. They were picking out a stuffed panda puppet for my nephew Dan.

Afterwards we started to make our way back to the car. It was starting to rain a little bit but it wasn't too bad....considering we had been very lucky so far on this trip with great weather. On the walk back we passed by Ford's Theater where President Lincoln was assassinated. And the house they took him too after he had been shot.

Ford's Theater

Mike, Nicole and Josh in front of a Lincoln gift shop

Home where Lincoln was taken after shot

When we got back to the car, we did a drive by of the train station and then headed over to the Pentagon and the Iwo Jima Memorial. We passed by some more cool looking buildings.

 

Very Cool mural

Train Station

 

One last look at the Capitol Building

Down under the city

The closest we got to the Jefferson Memorial...looks pretty cool

The Pentagon

The Iwo Jima Memorial

To say it was big would be an understatement...I look so little

Arlington Cemetery.

 Then we headed back to our hotel for the night. Traffic was pretty bad going back. But we got to see some of the Jet liners fly over on their way to the airport. That was pretty neat.

We got a nice sleep in the hotel, in the morning we were going to start our long drive to South Carolina.