The National Museum of Natural History building was constructed in 1911 to house the growing collections that were originally in the Smithsonian Castle and later moved to the National Museum Building. Some sections of the museum are a bit outdated especially the Hall of Bones and the cases displaying birds that were collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other exhibits cover dinosaurs, mammals, geology, gem stones, human origins, and the oceans.
Art made from trash that was found on beaches
This a popular museum for kids so it can get crowded. The Hall of Dinosaurs is undergoing a massive upgrade and will reopen in 2019 so it will be even busier for a while.
The accessible entrance to the museum is located on Constitutional Ave. If you park on Madison Drive, like we did, take a little time to walk/roll through the Sculpture Garden and Pollinator Garden. The gardens and the exhibits in the museum are accessible.
We parked on Madison Drive which is located south of the museum. DC has recently implemented fee parking along all of the streets where parking was previously free. On most streets the fee is $2.00 an hour payable by credit card or phone app. The spaces are not marked with lines so RVs fees are the same as car fees. The maximum time is 3 hours, the same as it was previously. In the past this was not enforced but now it’s necessary to pay attention to the time which puts a crimp in long walks or long museum visits. A benefit of the parking fees is that spaces are easy to find. Spaces that would have filled by 9:30 in the morning are still available at 12:00. Museum 38.89205, -77.02597
On one of my many visits to the NMNH one of my mother's friends read the plaque on that elephant and said, "Oh, it was killed the day I was born." From then on, it was stuck in my young mind, "That's Mrs. Stark's elephant."
ReplyDeleteFunny how things like that stick in your head. From now on it will most likely be Mrs. Stark's and Al's elephant in my not-so-young mind! :-D
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