My Travel Journal: So many things to see!

I dropped Sophia off at Heather's and spent the night there before coming down to Chris in Virginia. Got here Wednesday afternoon and Thursday we really made a day of it.

Chris had seen that there was a special exhibit at the National Building Museum about life in a dollhouse. And at the Renwick Gallery after a 2-year shut-down for restorations and a reopening called "Wonder" which had only recently closed, they were now back to normal with special exhibits and items from their own collections.

We went to the Building Museum first and walked in to find the first floor converted into an ocean with icebergs! I'm not real sure why, but it was pretty incredible. From the floor you were looking "under water" at the triangular bases and then you went up a staircase (within the exhibit) to see the tops sticking up out of the "water". Children were really having a field day with it and it was a really fun exhibit. The miniature/dollhouse exhibit was delightful, of course. We also went through a one-man photography exhibit featuring all black and white landscape photographs which were beautiful. Photographs weren't allowed in that exhibit. But I took photos where possible and am going to put them here in order seen and pop in with comments when the mood strikes. :)

An "above water" shot of the tips of the icebergs (the tallest one in the exhibit was 54 feet!)

Chris told me these columns were built using bricks and then faux finished to simulate marble. They are beautiful and are among the tallest Corinthian columns in the world. I had no idea they weren't real marble when I saw them. That's my 6'2" son standing by the column second picture.

The Life in a Dollhouse had both dollhouses and roomboxes and each dollhouse had a little story to go with it involving a set of characters who were portrayed in pictures on the wall by the dollhouse. The one above I took because the big chair and the two stools are needlework.

The one above was called "Cabinet under the stairs" and Chris told me it is based on something in the Harry Potter stories.

This roombox was probably my favorite and so I took several shots of it.

And this one just blew me away with all the books!

I really liked this next one too. Very cosmopolitan air to it. All of these roomboxes were made by relatively local people - designers, architects, etc., and are to be auctioned off after the exhibit closes.

The next two shots I took as we left the building. They had a model of the building which houses the museum and when I went to take a closer look I discovered that the whole thing is made of Legos including the columns. Pretty neat I thought. And they had placed a container there for donations which seemed like a good place for it. The glare from the protective clear box doesn't help the pictures. :)