Bruce and I took a weekend trip to Washington DC for our anniversary. (Here he is on the plane celebrating with some of our free drink coupons.)
Like most vacations, we hit the ground running the minute we got off the plane. Since the weather was glorious (a nice change from the interminably-long winter we've been having), we hustled over to see some of the monuments so I could get a stamp in my National Park passport book. I managed to get 7 stamps the first day (Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, World War II, etc); by the time we left town, I had a total of 14 stamps and 40,000 steps on my Fitbit.
Most of the cherry trees were still in bloom. We missed the "official" cherry blossom festival the week before, but the parks were still crowded with tons of tour buses.
The second day we hit the Smithsonian museums. Bruce's favorite was the Air & Space Museum. They had a big display of Boeing aircraft through the years. Bruce even saw exhibits about a couple programs he worked on.
My favorite museum was American History. I originally went there intending to see the First Ladies exhibit. It was much smaller than I expected - mostly a side room off the Presidents' display.
But down in the basement, they had an Inventors' gallery (right up my alley). One exhibit highlighted, Ralph Baer - the Father of the video game. While he isn't technically considered the inventor of the first game, he's the one who created games you could play on your TV, like Pong. This picture shows his prototype for a 2-person game controller.
I liked looking at the display of his desk. I think it looks a lot like my own desk with the soldering irons, electronics, and stuffed animals. He even had a Barbie doll on one shelf, but no robots.
The funny thing was they had a robot in the Visitor Center giving people information. The robot used its little iPad to give you directions to various attractions or it would pose so you could take a selfie with it. I found out that the first Smithsonian institution was called the "Castle of Curiosities." I wonder if James Smithson even imagined that a robot would be talking to people in his museum.
