Weekend in Washington, DC

This past weekend, we traveled to Washington, DC for a professional development event, and to visit family. The trip to Maryland/DC is one we make pretty often in the Respect the Van family.  We try to keep things new and exciting by visiting different museums and DC has not disappointed us yet.

We stayed at the Embassy Suites at Chevy Chase Pavilion. It was carefully chosen to be near to the professional development event, include breakfast, have an indoor pool AND be near the Metro. It was a real gem and we will certainly return if we need to be close to the city center. My tripadvisor review is pending, and you should be able to view it here very soon: https://www.tripadvisor.com/members/lauraamccarthy

It was an excellent hotel in a perfect location for what we needed. We took the Metro into town in less than 30 minutes. We changed lines from Red to Blue to get a bit closer to the museum due to the cold, snowy weather.  The Federal Triangle stop was only about 2 blocks from the museum, very nice.

Snowy December day kept the crowds away!

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History had been updated extensively since our last visit a few years ago, which was a wonderful surprise.  We enjoyed docents exhibiting and teaching about tarantulas, cockroaches, and mammals. The big kids especially enjoyed an exhibit called Q?ruis (pronounced Curious). It was a hands-on exhibit, geared toward older school aged kids and teens. Q?rius had sections about disease epidemiology, identifying artifacts, and examining collection items under a microscope. There is a junior version that we did not visit, and I expect it is also fabulous, for younger kiddos.  Since this museum is free to the public, we felt ok to spend the small fee to check out the butterfly exhibit.  Butterflies were everywhere, and landed on almost all of our group members. Here is a beautiful creature who landed on my leg and stayed there until we left the exhibit!

Apparently these butterflies are attracted to blue things.

We spent the rest of the weekend celebrating a family birthday, so our weekend felt busy but with some relaxing built in.  What are your favorite weekend trips?