First, a bit of a tangent: We have already told you that we are not real time bloggers. Yes, we have done a #TBT Throw Back Thursday blog post or two. Or three. But we didn’t think that we’d get so far behind on our blogging that a mid-January trip to Washington DC would by all rights end up meriting a #throwback tag. Now that we’ve finally wrapped up our posts from our wonderful Viking Romantic Danube cruise, it’s time for us to share our experience of an awesome long weekend in DC.
DC has so many free attractions that it’s easy to pull together a busy itinerary for a trip there. We timed this to hit a special art show and a strange little exhibit, while also taking in the monuments. Oh, and we had some really nice meals while we were there, too.
Vermeer
As we discussed in our blog post from Vienna, we’re on something of a quest to travel to see as many of Vermeer’s works as possible. A wonderful show at the National Gallery of Art, put together in conjunction with the Louvre and the Irish National Gallery, included a sizable portion of his works, along with other Dutch artists of his era. My photos don’t do his work justice, but here are the Vermeers we saw, including two National Gallery works that weren’t part of the show:
We saw some other great works at the National Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery:
Nutshells
All right, this is a little bit weird, but one of the reasons we *had* to make this trip to DC was to go to a show at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery (next to Blair House, kitty-corner from the White House): Murder is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. The show features dollhouse-sized dioramas of true crime scenes that have been used for decades in forensic science training. Macabre? Yes, definitely. Each of the dioramas displayed a fascinating level of detailed workmanship. Click on each of the pictures below to see larger versions, unless you’re too squeamish to see the recreated death/murder scenes!
Monuments
Everywhere you turn in DC, it feels like there’s yet another landmark in view:
We’d never seen the MLK Memorial in DC. At first we thought it was located a bit out of the way, but the setting was beautiful, and must be absolutely breath-taking when the cherry blossoms are in bloom.
We definitely plan on going back to DC again. Next we need to see the new Obama portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, make sure we hit the rest of the corners of the National Gallery of Art, and see if we can do more than scratch the surface at some of the other Smithsonian museums.
Halfway There Travelers 
Now I’m thinking I should go!
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