8th January

The predicted snowfall came this morning and dumped about 20cm in half an hour (while we were asleep, unfortunately) and then passed over. This is what we came out to!! Just enough snow to make everything pretty but not to affect the roads.

We caught the Metro from New Carrollton into the Smithsonian and came out of the station right in the middel of the Mall.
This is the Washington Monument"

And this is looking the other way to the Capitol Building.

There weren't many tourists around - maybe because it was too cold! We started at the Air and Space Museum. Joe and I saw a planetarium film at it was almost 3D. It was wonderful.

Joe and I caught the train to Arlington Cemetary to see the grave of our friend from Hawaii = Bob Morrison. Bob died 18 months ago and had served in the US Navy for many years.

This is is a view of the Lee Mansion on the hill over Arlington.

By this time, we had split up from Bill, Stephen, Jess and Amelia.

Joe and I then caught the train back to the Smithsonian. We went into the Museum of American History. There is so much to see there that we only just managed to skim over most of it. Many of the exhibitions that I had seen before weren't currently on display. Apparently only 2% of the Smithsonian is ever on display at any time.

This is the most gorgeous dolls house imagineable:

This is a dress belonging to Martha Washington. There were quite a few First Lady's Gowns on display.

These are original Mouseketeers ears belonging to Lonnie ?????

This was an amazing quilt made in the 1850's. The quilter made it while waiting for her husband to be to return from an 8 year journey to the frontier. Lots of amazingling small quilting and beautiful applique.

There was a wonderful display of transport which included steam trains, buses, carts and trains. This is one of the amazing locomotives. They had all these figures that would very lifelike except for the colour and we kept thinking they were real when we saw them out the corners of our eyes!!

We eventually met up with the others at the Museum of Natural History. After paying for all the crowded museums in New York it was incredible that all of the Smithsonian is free.

This is the Washington Monument at sunset as we were heading back to the Metro.

We stopped off for a quick visit to Walmart on the way back to Bill and Margies.