Smithsonian Castle

This was my view as I sat on a park bench in the middle of the Mall and spoke with Anne. I hadn’t talked to her for a day and it was good to hear her voice. It was a brilliant, brisk morning and I was waiting for the museums to open. A bicycle cop interrupted our conversation, when he asked if I was someone else. By the time that this post sees daylight, she will have started her new teacher gig. It would have been nice if she could have come on this trip too. 

I couldn’t do even two museums today. I ran out of camera battery and steam at about the same time. I did the American History and most of the Natural History museum. I’ll have to go back tomorrow and finish up, which will put a dent in what I had planned for the next day.

As I lined up for first entry, one of the many showboating security guards that I’ve met, gave us in line to get in his spiel. In his seemingly endless list of things you shouldn’t try to bring into the museum, he jokingly ended with guns. If you had any of these things, he invited you to come up and speak with him. As it turned out, the guy ahead of me had a gun. The guard told him to see him inside. What with our county’s current, bullshit interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, I can imagine, him being a white guy, giving him and asking him not do it again.

After the Nat’s parade, I skirted by an NRA rally that was being held in front of the Capitol. To parrot our illustrious leader, it looked small and weak. It’s hard to compete with the Nats in this town. It is a bit of police state here though. Isn’t that what the NRA is supposedly fighting? There is the pervasive DC police, who were showing off their SWAT team’s new four wheeled toy on the Mall, after the Nats parade. By the Capitol, it’s the Capitol police. By the Whitehouse, it’s the Secret Service. I think that they too were overhelmed by the Nats fans.