Breakfast at Paul, and the Smithsonian

No trip to DC is complete without the Smithsonian museums, and I particularly wanted to see my childhood favorites, Natural History and Air & Space.  Unsurprisingly, approximately 20,000 school kids on field trips had the same idea!

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To start the day, we walked from our hotel down to the Navy Memorial, heading to one of the locations of the French boulangerie chain Paul.  The weather was just perfect – so we grabbed a table outside and shared a slice of warm leek quiche and a tarte au citron.

It was a very DC-esque breakfast, complete with besuited types meeting over coffee, a dignified man conducting a cell phone conversation in French, and white-haired Navy veterans taking photos at the memorial across the way.

Next up, Natural History.  We arrived just before the 10am opening and joined one of the lines for entry, behind a large contingent of pre-schoolers.  Always follow the little kiddos – since they don’t carry purses and backpacks, security checks proceed quickly.

Once inside, we went straight upstairs to the Gems and Minerals exhibit.  The jewelry (including the Hope Diamond) is beautiful, of course, but it’s the minerals that fascinate me most.

I could spend hours examining their myriad colors and forms: one like saffron-colored bubbles, another like a ziggurat carved from rubies.  Here’s one that’s as bulbous and blue as a modern sculpture, there’s one impersonating a handful of nails attached to a magnet.

And I have to wonder just how tiny crystalline spikes formed into a shape that looks like nothing so much as a white marabou powder puff.

The Fossil Hall is closed until 2019, so we took a quick spin through some photography exhibits instead.  One advantage of both the minerals and photos is that they weren’t too terribly crowded or noisy.

The next day found us in the Air & Space Museum, where we poked around most of the exhibits.  One of the highlights was chatting with a young volunteer chaperoning a real-life spacesuit, which we could examine close up.