Smithsonian

For two days I had to amuse myself in Washington from breakfast until dinner and I spent the majority of that time in various museums of the Smithsonian Institution.  I can't recommend these enough.  Where else can you see the Hope Diamond...

...the capsule used by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on their moon shot in 1969...

...the Spirit of St Louis...

...the bones of a Neanderthal...

 ...and Julia Child's kitchen?

Nowhere, that's where.  I spent a whole day in the Air and Space Museum, and then a few hours each on the second day looking around the Natural History Museum and the American History Museum.

Mrs Walles joined me for the last one.  One of the feature attractions there is the Star Spangled Banner, the actual flag that flew over Fort McHenry at Baltimore as the British were repelled in 1814 and which inspired the words to the US national anthem.  It's not in a good state, having had bits snipped off over the years as souvenirs, and like the documents in the National Archive it is too fragile to allow photography.

Another noted attraction of the American History Museum is the collection of First Ladies' gowns.  Mrs Walles and I enjoyed speculating on the origins of some of the convoluted connections between early First Ladies and their respective presidents.  A surprising number of wives were absent, and two presidents had remarried while in office.  Quite a few First Ladies were sisters, daughters or nieces or in-laws.

Huge geek that I am I was very moved to see things like the Apollo 11 capsule in the Air and Space Museum.  But I was also moved by another spacecraft there for entirely different reasons.

That is SpaceShipOne, which one the X Prize a few years ago for being the first privately built vehicle to reach space (and which Richard Branson is now trying to commericialise).  But it was significant for me because when I decided to have a go at this writing lark back in 2003 the very first article I had published was about the X Prize.  I remember that it had an illustration of this very craft accompanying it, and now I've seen it in the flesh.

Back when the Smithsonian's collection was still housed in one building it gained the nickname of "America's attic", from the enormous jumble of things that it contained.  And while it has been split now into about a dozen museums, their close proximity (most are on the Mall) means you can still get that effect by meandering from one museum to the next and taking in as much as you can.  I only took in a tiny amount of the museums I visited - and there are still museums I didn't even get to - so I'll definitely be going back

Oh and did I mention that they are all free?  The US taxpayer spends almost a billion dollars a year funding all this for the greater good of the nation.  The Smithsonian really is a remarkable thing.  It was created out of a bequest by a British scientist, James Smithson who died in 1829.  He never visited America but left his fortune to the US government to increase and diffuse knowledge.  From what I've seen I'd say they've lived up pretty well to his wishes.