DC - Sept 2017 - Days 5 & 6 & 7

September 3, 2017

International Spy Museum

My name is Carol, Carol Liu…I was a spy for the day at the International Spy Museum! There was an admission to get into the museum, but we were able to find a $3 off per person at the hotel we were staying at. It was $21.95 for adults.  We spent about 2 hours at the museum, our friends spent 4 hours.  Your ticket does allow you to leave and come back.  When we left, there was a line forming outside of the building, so I would recommend going early if you plan to go.  Some of the popular items to check out include the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, the lipstick pistol, and the spy pigeon.

We had lunch next door at the Shake Shack. It was a bit of a line, but it was a convenient location. After lunch, we headed over to the Smithsonian American History Museum. The highlights at the American History Museum include: the Star-Spangled Banner and the invention hall.

After spending a few hours there, we met our friends at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum. I find the Air & Space Museum incredibly boring, but the guys just loved it. The museum is home to the largest collection of air and spacecraft in the world.

Dinner ended up just being at the Capitol Bistro, which was in our hotel. There was a buffet option and we did that, it was decent ($23/person).

September 4, 2017

Union Station

The morning started with saying farewell to our friends. They had taken the Amtrak Train from Charleston, SC.  In the future, they said that would not take the train – long ride (7 hrs. and once getting off the train they felt like they were swaying back and forth).  We had a little bit of time to spend at Union Station before the next door Smithsonian of Postal Stamps opened.  Union Station is a pretty building but there were a lot of homeless people in that area. The Postal Museum actually ended up being a lot more interesting that we had expected. The highlights were the “Jenny” stamps (stamps that were misprinted – for sure watch the video about it!), you can select six cancelled stamps to take home with you, mail a postcard, and learn about how mail is moved. We ended up spending more time that planned at the museum, about 2 hours.

Besides food options, at Union Station, not much else was super close by, so we decided to venture to the area near the capitol building were lots of options showed up on TripAdvisor.  We decided on We the Pizza. It was a neat little place where you can buy pizza by the slice (I had the BBQ one and it was good). We also tried the garlic knots – yum! 

After lunch, we headed to the United States Botanic Garden. For some reason, I had expected this place to be really large, but in reality, it did not take much time at all to make it thru the place.  There were some really neat plants!

"The Castle" Smithsonian Building

Next stop the Smithsonian Institution Building, also known as “The Castle”, the first Smithsonian museum.  The museum was a great place to figure out what Smithsonian has the most stuff you would be interested in – lots of touch screen options.  In general, there were not that many things to see in this specific Smithsonian.  Based on the touch screen, we had missed quite a bit of stuff at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, so we headed back over there for a few hours. Leaving the museum, we headed over to the Chinatown area.

Chinatown

The previous day we had waited too long to figure dinner out so we made reservations earlier in the day for a place called Plan B Burger (also called b DC Penn Quarter), again based on a recommendation from a friend.  The place was not very busy and the food was great!  We had tried to get a reservation the night before but there was like a 2-3 hour wait. The restaurant is next to the US Navy Memorial Plaza.

September 5, 2017

Time to head back to Michigan… We had a few hours to spare in the morning, so we headed back to the Air and Space Museum, since there was some stuff that Mike did not get a chance to see.  Noon was our hotel check-out time, which just happened to be about the time we needed to head to the airport.  We took the Metro to the airport, checked our bags, and got thru security really fast. The line to check bags was longer than the security line.  We had lunch in the airport terminal at a place called Good Stuff Eatery. It was really good!  Our flight home was delayed about 20 minutes due to incoming storms. The flight was a bit longer since we took a different route than normal and it was pretty smooth right until right before we landed.  All in all it was great trip!  Of course, we need to go back and visit again – a few National Park sites were closed for remodeling. One thing that we did not do during our visit was take advantage of the Bike Share – it seemed like a great idea and we saw lots of bike stands around. If you are visiting DC you might want to check into that to get around to places.