Expedition 7: The Northwest Navigations, Pt. II

Early morning walk to...the wrong museum

 Another long, fun journey! Metro Journey 7 featured new classmates, more fascinating landmarks, and LOTS of rain. This blog post is your newest walkthrough of D.C.'s seemingly endless historical destinations. Let's take that walk now, eh?

Step 1: An "Earthly" Exhibit
Here we go for another journey. I was up at 7:00 this time, and on my way to Largo to meet up with Cortland (my brother was unable to join us this time because he had work that afternoon) to begin the outing. We rode about 35 minutes to convene at Federal Triangle, and after an eternal wait (just kidding, Gavin), we got underway. Unfortunately, we ended up trekking to the wrong museum. We were assigned through clues to visit the National Museum of American History, but we accidentally went to the National Museum of Natural History.

The Natural History Museum

 Nevertheless, we wound up enjoying the experience and taking plenty of pictures, so I'll include information on it. It opened in 1910 as one of the original Smithsonian institutions. Featuring over 126 million (no, your eyes are fine, reader, indeed it is million) overall scientific artifacts, the popular green-domed museum is home to a wide variety of natural exhibits and displays. While we were exploring in the wrong POI, a college-aged lady stopped us and asked to take pictures of us looking at the displays. She and her friend were part of a neat photography class, and she wanted to practice taking silhouetted pictures. She politely asked the oldest looking people in our group (alas, I look 12) to gaze at an African animal exhibit as she took photos of them. Afterwards, she inquired about our class, and as we've done before, we explained how the Metro Journey class works. The questions we get about our group are so interesting to me; it's surprising to me when I see people with basically no knowledge of homeschool as they ask us about it. 

Step 2: A Grand Gallery
Once we realized our mistake, the nearest POI to us was the Renwick Gallery. This was probably my favorite stop of the day, as it exhibited the coolest decorative art I've ever seen. It was originally intended to be home to a private art collection of William Corcoran, Corcoran was passionate about the emergence of art in the United States with the belief that America would never be known as a great superpower without its own fine arts and craft. So, in 1858, he sought a builder what he saw as a contemporary art museum. He found James Renwick Jr., a well-known architect who'd worked on other buildings in D.C.. Since 1972, the Renwick Gallery has been a part of the Smithsonian institution. We entered the museum and headed up the stairs to look around a bit. In the upstairs was a vast room with a large, soft rug on the floor, where people were just laying down. It seemed pretty cool, so we joined and stared at a colorful tapestry elevated near the ceiling, and just stayed there for a while.

The...whatever it was, above us at the Renwick Gallery

Once we almost fell asleep, it was time to take a tour of other exhibits in the Gallery. The tour guide started off explaining the history of the Gallery's creation and construction, then lead us first to a stunning display of...index cards. There was a quite amazing display of index cards stacked like thick stalagmites made by one Sheila Duignan. The multiple pillars of partially wooden cards weighed a total of 20,000 pounds and were held together with wood in the middle.

The large index card displays 

Next up on the tour was a rainbow-colored display of embroidery threads designed by Gabriel Dawe. The guide explained that Dawe grew up in Mexico and fell in love with vivid colors and embroidery art. In this display, he used over 12,600 individual threads and countless measurements to construct. It was by far the most impressive piece of art I've seen on the journeys yet.

The eye-popping embroidery display

 We were a bit short on time, so we elected to follow the tour to one more exhibit. Up next was a series of large, wide nests made from thousands of willow branches from New York State. Created by Patrick Dougherty and his assistant, its assembly took 6 days a week for three weeks, and amazingly used very few nails; almost the entire structure was artfully woven together. Once we were done at the Gallery, we had to move on to our final POI of the day...

Step 3: A "Faithful" House 
We never ended up visiting the two other POI's we were supposed to go to (we had Carpe Librum and Cafe Grande to go to, but we never made it), but the last step in your walkthrough took us to the National Museum of American History. We had to find a dollhouse in the museum and take pictures, so after wandering through some other floors of the place, we made our way to the Faith Bradford Dollhouse. Bradford created the 23-room house to accommodate Mr. and Mrs. Doll, their ten kids, five servants, two visiting grandparents, and twenty pets. We didn't really stay in the Dollhouse long (it was too small for us anyway :P), hunger called us elswhere for lunch, then to Mrs. Fogg's (our class coordinator) house for a meeting. 

The Dollhouse. If you look closely, Antman is on the bed

Counting your steps:
And that about sums up yet another fun, RAINY day in the nation's capital. I enjoyed the Renwick Gallery a lot, and the Museum of Natural History was accidentally awesome too. I hope you enjoyed this latest blog from MJ #7. Until next time, dear reader...oh, and enjoy a few extra pictures from the day.

"Thank the maker!"

Chilling out on at Renwick Gallery

Muhammad Ali's gloves

The White House