Your Vacation, Should You Choose to Accept It....

After the Air and Space Museum, it was well past time for lunch. We wound up getting that at the Wharf, a collection of restaurants and stores along the Washington Channel. The Wharf hadn't been a "planned stop" on our trip, but was a lucky find; it was just a nice spot on the water with plenty to see.

Then it was time for our second museum of the day, the International Spy Museum. It's one of many DC museums that isn't part of the Smithsonian Institution, but it's well worth going. It's a perfectly curated collection of artifacts and stories of real spycraft, peppered with just a hint of famous fictional spies.

In the museum, you can hear about revolutionaries who spied on the British for George Washington's forces. You can learn about a tunnel painstakingly cut beneath the Berlin Wall. You can see real-life Bond-style gadgets used to surveil, pass messages, assassinate, and more. I learned about Julia Child's unexpected connection to intelligence gathering. About the brilliant Russian spy hung out to dry by Stalin. About the real Mata Hari, not the much glamorized version of fiction. And you get to role play a little, if you're into it: as you move through the exhibit, a series of computer stations presents you with a cover identity, a mission, complications to avoid, and ultimately a debrief.

And then, in a special extra exhibit, we saw a collection of more than a dozen different vehicles from James Bond movies. They ranged from pristine to bullet-riddled, from tiny taxi to huge speedboat/glider combo, from the 1960s to the 2000s. A fun little walk through film history that made me want to go back and watch some of those movies again.

Then we decided to go to the Washington Monument. While it is possible to go inside, tickets are incredibly limited, released the day before, and get snatched up in literally seconds. We'd been trying every day to get in without success, and now knew for sure we wouldn't be going inside before we returned home. Previously, hoping that we would get in, we hadn't really gone up close to the monument on our initial tour of the National Mall on day one -- and so we did so now.

It turned out to be fortuitous, because as we were touring the plaza around the Washington Monument, we saw a marine helicopter circle and land in the lawn at the White House. Still reeling over how neat that had looked (and what great pictures we snapped of it), we watched as the helicopter took off again, made a circuit around the monument, then went back and landed at the White House again. And again. And again. Some kind of practice drill, clearly.

But it was enough to spur us to head in the direction of the White House. It turns out that you can't get anywhere near as close to it as you used to be able to -- barriers and stern-looking guards establish a perimeter many blocks away from the building itself. Still, the marine helicopter kept entertaining us as we got as close we could, snapped a few pictures... 

And then decided it was time for dinner, and for closing down for the night. We had one final day in DC remaining.