Up, Up and Away!

Today we went to the National Air and Space Museum. Today happens to be the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, so how could I not have my picture taken next to the Apollo 11 capsule. I remember how excited we were when Apollo 11 blasted off and as it approached the Moon. On this day in 1969 my parents woke us up in what seemed like the middle of the night, so we could see the first men walk on the moon. It seemed like such a promise back then. The future shown to us by Star Trek seemed attainable.

The Apollo 11 capsule is small, the Gemini 4 from which the first U.S. space walk was taken is smaller, and the Mercury 6 that carried John Glenn into orbit tiny. Hanging above the the space capsules is another historic machine--The Spirit of St. Louis, which Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic. It is also smaller than one imagines, even though it was never described as a large plane. We also saw the Wright Brothers' machine that first flew at Kitty Hawk and ushered in the age of the airplane.  But I was more interested in the Spirit of St. Louis and the Tingmissartoq, which Charles and his  wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh flew on two long trips. Perhaps because the Lindberghs lived in Darien and still had a
home there when I was growing up there. I also remember reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries while I was in high school.

The Timgmissartoq exhibit showed the scope of the trips the Lindbergh made by plane in 1931 and 1933 to scout early airline routes. Like most of the exhibits in the museum it provided just the right amount of information without being overwhelming or forgetting that people of all ages come to this museum. The Air and Space Museum is one of the most popular of the Smithsonian museums, as was evidenced by the crowd there today. The only one of the museums I've visited so far that had a similar number of people was the Natural History Museum.

I also enjoyed the Aircraft Carrier exhibit, which included a  fairly extensive area covering the War in the Pacific during World War II. The plane in this picture is a Douglas SBD-6. I took the picture because as a boy I had a metal toy version of  this plane. It is amazing the amount of history here that I remember within my own lifetime or was a part of my childhood. My other favorite exhibit was Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air. It tries to dispel the romantic images that make up our current cultural memory of World War I. The reality was a far cry from Snoopy and the Red Baron!

 We had some time before we were due for dinner with friends, so we also stopped at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Other than the Rodin "Back" sculptures, I was underwhelmed. I think my favorite moment was when a young father stopped at a sculpture with his two sons and asked them what they thought of it. The older boy said, "It looks like a lot of lines squiggled together." (Which it kind of did look like.) The father responded, "All drawings are a lot of lines squiggled together. But what do you think about this?" "It could be a spider," the boy said. Absolutely perfect. One entire floor of the museum was closed for renovation, and the exhibits are spare and spread out, so we weren't there for very long. As we were leaving the Sculpture Garden we passed this sculpture, "Last Conversation Piece" by Spanish artist Juan Munoz. The first thing that came to my mind was "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!" A woman behind us said it out loud. We had a good laugh about it.

I still have a list of places I want to visit in the area, but I'm getting there one one.  Well sometimes two by two. Until the next adventure...