Washington D.C.
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| Us with Hahn/Cock on the roof of The National Gallery |
Taking MARC to D.C.
Today we got up early to catch the last train into D.C.
MARC is commuter rail and so they only run (right now) 4 trains into D.C. in the morning and then like 6 trains out in the evening. It isn't set up for retired tourists like ourselves that don't want to live on a schedule. We arrived for the 8:05am train with plenty of time.
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| The sun rises behind Camden Station |
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| Both MARC and Light Rail share this station |
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| Baltimore has Light Rail! We will ride it eventually. |
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| There are 3 MARC tracks. You don't know which track your train will be on until you see it pull up. |
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| Me and an electric scooter pose at the station |
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| Oh Hi MARC. |
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| Right before we put on masks because everyone was wearing them. |
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| Small stations line the way to D.C. except the College Park Station which serves a lot of people and The University of Maryland. |
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| You can activate 2 tickets at once. We bought a pack of 6 because it was quite a bit cheaper per ticket. We will need 8 tickets for 2 trips each. |
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| We saw many different rail services as we pulled into Washington Union Station. |
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| Disembarking in Union Station |
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| It's huge and really ugly compared to the stations we have seen on our trip |
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| Bleh! |
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| But then you enter the old part of the station and it is much nicer |
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| And then the Main Hall is really nice! |
The Getting Lost Part!
Our plan was to walk to The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. We looked it up and it is the most popular so we decided to hit it first. It's a 25 minute walk from Union Station and we had 30 minutes until it opened. We had time to take photos on the walk!
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| The Capitol Building in our nation's Capital. |
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| It was a beautiful day for a walk. |
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| I took this photo and then I led us in the wrong direction for almost a mile. |
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| The dotted line is the optimal route. The red line is the approximate route we took. In my defense, my phone map was going crazy! |
After our extended walking tour of D.C. we ended up at the National Sculpture Garden and were pulled in by the siren song of pastries and coffee at the café. It ended up being a really nice walk through the sculpture garden and a nice coffee and pastry break.
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| There were like 6 of these "chairs" in a circle and the sign said you could sit in them so we took photos of each other sitting in them. |
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| Louis Bourgeios' Spider We saw another one of these at The Kemper in K.C. |
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| Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen's Typwriter Eraser |
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| The Cafe |
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| Hector Guimard's An Entrance to the Paris Metropolitan We saw one of these in Chicago |
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| Roy Lichtenstein's House I |
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| Barry Flanagan's Thinker on a Rock |
After the sculpture garden and fueling up on coffee and sugar bread we were ready for a crowded museum! We did the short walk to The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
National Museum of Natural History
All but 1 of the Smithsonian museums in D.C. are free. This is one of the museums that kids go to on field trips and we saw them in droves. We did our best to avoid people but it is hard in there.
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| We were fine, it jumped right over us. |
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| We have seen both of these in real life on our trip this year |
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| The Animal Stuff was packed so we decided to go to Minerals and Gems |
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| Text from the display, "Without any doubt, this is the oldest material you'll ever see. It is older than the Solar System itself. The milky liquid in this vial contains tiny diamonds forged in the explosion of a dying star. Blasted across space, they were incorporated in the cloud that gave birth to our solar system and were preserved inside a meteorite that fell to Earth in 1969. From such grains, we learn how the chemical elements form within distant stars." |
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| The Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Layer (the layer that shows when the giant meteor hit the earth and killed most life) |
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| I'm touching a rock from Mars! This rock fell to Earth in a meteorite. |
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| Next up, Volcanic rock structures |
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| And minerals! This one shows gold! |
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| The Star of Bombay owned by actress Mary Pickford |
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| The Hope Diamond. Almost as pretty as some of the other stuff we saw but way more valuable. Have an extra $250m laying around? |
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| We are practically the same! Measure up to an Elephant! |
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| After a bit we were tired of people so we went to the cafe, sat under a giant shark and shared a beer. |
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| Before leaving we walked through the Birds of DC collection. |
The National Gallery
We spent less time than expected at the Natural History Museum so we decided to walk to the National Gallery to see art while waiting for the first train out of D.C. The walk went smoothly because it was a more direct walk and also because Donna helped navigate.
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| The main building of The National Gallery has an amazing waterfall just outside the window. This photo fails to capture how cool it is. |
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| The East Building is where a lot of the Modern Art is so we headed there via an underground tunnel |
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| The moving walkway and tunnel is awesome! This photo fails to show how awesome it is. |
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| So I took a GIF. Amazing right? |
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| Soon we found Modern Art, I mean besides that cool walkway. |
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| This exhibit was called, "The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900". There were works by artists riffing off of each other as well as artists doing series of the same image. It seemed to be all about repetition and reflection. |
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| Henri Matisse Still Life with Oranges (II) |
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| Henri Matisse Still Life with Compote, Apples, and Oranges |
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| Piet Mondrian Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red |
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| Marlow Moss White, Black, Red and Gray |
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| Jasper Johns False Start I and False Start II |
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| Frank Stella Jasper's Dilemma This was Stella's take on John's work above |
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| Andy Warhol The Shadow |
After walking through the featured exhibit we headed to the more permanent collection area.
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| The building was amazing. I took a ton of photos in this exhibit but this post is already really long and there is still much to see. |
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| Arshile Gorky Organization |
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| The Alexander Calder Mobile is currently on the ground. It even looks cool like this. It normally hangs in the giant East Wing Foray |
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| Alejandro Arostegui Beast |
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| Mark Rothko Sacrificial Moment |
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| Bradley Walker Tomlin Maneuver for Position |
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| Jackson Pollock Number 7, 1951 |
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| Jackson Pollock Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) |
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| Jackson Pollock Ritual |
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| Ad Reinhardt Untitled (Red and Gray) |
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| Sam Gilliam Shoot Six |
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| Helen Frankenthaler Mountains and Sea |
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| Thomas Downing Billie's Ring Preliminary |
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| James Rosenquist White Bread |
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| Andy Warhol A Boy for Meg |
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| Roy Lichtenstein Look Mickey |
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| Claes Oldenburg Clarinet Bridge |
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| Next we went to the Called to Create Black Artists of the American South exhibit |
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| Joe Light Birdman Trainer |
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| Royal Robertson Sevenly Out of Body Travels |
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| Georgia Speller Gloria Jean with her Old Man and Sally Brown, a Friend Lady |
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| Even the closed off stairway looked like art |
Again, there was so much to see and I took way more photos but this is a long post and there is still more to see so if you want to see more, just go there. It is amazing! After the Called to Create exhibit we walked the hall and saw a few more permanent pieces on the way to trying to catch the first train back to Baltimore.
MARK ROTHKO The Classic Paintings
Born in Russia in 1903, Mark Rothko immigrated to the United States in 1913, settling in Oregon, where he grew interested in music, theater, and leftist politics. He moved to New York after dropping out of Yale University in 1923 and began to study painting at the Art Students League. Embracing expressionism and surrealism, he explored themes of biology, prophecy, ritual, and the unconscious.
In 1949 Rothko hit upon a deceptively simple, abstract format: soft-edged, horizontal rectangles suspended on a monochrome, usually vertical field. Making his own paints, Rothko applied colors in thin, veil-like washes. The large size of his canvases was meant to address the viewer, never to be "grandiose" (as he wrote) but always "intimate and human." He refused interpretations that focused on formal issues of color, light, and space, insisting that he was "expressing basic human emotions-tragedy, ecstasy, doom." His belief that abstract painting could address existential questions was shared by Barnett Newman, whose works hang in the adjoining gallery.
After Rothko's suicide in 1970 and legal battles over his estate, the Mark Rothko Foundation, headed by Donald Blinken, donated more than one thousand works to the National Gallery of Art. This luminous room will be dedicated to changing installations of Rothko's work, beginning with his paintings of the early 1950s, when he was at the height of his powers.
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| On the way out we found more Andy Goldsworthy. We saw some of his work at the Nelson Atkins in K.C. |
Rushing to Catch the Wrong Train
We had about 30 minutes to get to from the museum to Union Station. The walk would take 15 minutes if we didn't get lost so we picked up the pace. It was a tiring day and we wanted to get home. We still have at least one more trip to D.C. planned.
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| We arrived at 3:15 in time for the 848 Dorsey train at 3:30. Donna asked why it said Dorsey and so I double checked and it was a short trip. It didn't go all the way into Baltimore! Our real train was in an hour. Lesson re-learned, look at the whole schedule. Not every train goes from end to end. |
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| Now we had time to explore Union Station and the D.C. Metro station within |
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| The last photo of the day was taken at Walgreens in Union Station. We were getting a bottle of OJ to hold us over until dinner. The quote above the nuts and snacks was very apropos. We intentionally missed our first train because it wasn't going where we wanted to go. |
At this point my phone started complaining about low battery life and our train tickets were on the phone so I had to go into energy economy mode. We boarded our train just fine and the phone lasted long enough to show the conductor our tickets. It even lasted the rest of the day so it wasn't a big deal but it would have been if my phone had died. It was a great day of adventure with a few mishaps along the way. Our next trip to D.C. should go much better.
If you missed yesterday's adventure you can check it out
here.
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