Two Days in Washington, DC with Kids: National Museum of African American History and Culture + More

Travel dates: May 30-31, 2018

I thought of the first part of our summer trip as a sampling of east coast cities. We sort of raced up the coast, stopping for just a couple of days in cities that we could easily have spent a week in. But Nova Scotia was calling. And the nice thing about east coast cities is that we’ve seen them before and it’s quite likely we’ll see them again before too much time has passed.

We’ve been to DC as a family a few times, and we explored it fairly thoroughly on a spring break trip a few years ago (which I blogged about here, here, and here), so our focus this time was on seeing things we hadn’t made it to before, especially the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

So I’ll cover that visit first, even though it was on day two of our stop, and then cover the other places we stopped.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in 2016 as the newest Smithsonian museum on the Mall in Washington, DC. It’s an amazing place, and, deservedly, it sees huge crowds and requires some pre-planning. There are three different ways to get tickets. You can take your chances on walk-up tickets–released starting at 1 PM weekdays only. As of this writing, the museum is starting to experiment with not requiring timed entry passes at certain times; in September 2019, walk-ups will be allowed on all weekdays until the museum reaches capacity.

You can get online starting at 6:30 AM to get same-day timed passes, available until they run out. You can request up to 4 same day passes.

What we did was get online several months in advance to get our timed passes on the day they were released for our visit. They’re released three months in advance on the first Wednesday of the month. So, for example, tickets for the entire month of December will be released on the first Wednesday in September. Tickets are free of charge, and we didn’t have any trouble getting our six tickets this way (six tickets is the limit) (although the site ran slowly, and I was sitting on the website for awhile).

However you get your tickets, my number one tip, as with so many popular tourist attractions, is to get there early. We had no trouble finding parking on the mall right by the museum when we got there a little before 10, but it was all full when we came out a couple of hours later (metered mall parking is only for 2-3 hours now, depending on the location, so you’ll have to move your car if you stay longer than that). And the lines build quickly inside the museum after it opens as well. And in the restaurant, so get there early and plan to eat lunch before the rush as well. We went to what turned out to be the back door to the museum–on the street side rather than the mall side–and walked right in at opening time at 10. On the side facing the Mall there was a long line before opening.

You start your museum tour by taking a huge elevator down to the bottom floor (the line for the elevator is both why there’s often a long wait to start the tour and the way traffic is controlled so that you can actually see things once you’re in the exhibit halls. We didn’t wait long just after the museum opened, but word is the wait can be as long as 30-45 minutes). The lower levels of the museum deal with history, starting with the slave trade and going through the civil rights movement. It is, of course, a sobering experience, and the design of the museum echoes the theme of the exhibits, with low lighting and ceilings at the bottom level. It’s a very heavy journey through hundreds of years of brutal history, punctuated with amazing glimpses of perseverance and resilience.

Now. We were here with our five year old plus our three tween and teen boys. There were not a lot of other five year olds there. That said, Abe hung in there for a couple of hours, and I think it was a worthwhile visit for him (and challenging but important for us to find ways to explain things to him that were both honest and age-appropriate). But he was ready to leave long before his older brothers, so we ended up leaving with him shortly after lunch and letting his brothers stay behind for a couple more hours.

Sweet Home Cafe is definitely a cut above your typical museum cafeteria, but, as I mentioned, get there early to avoid long lines (we went at 11:30 and had no wait and no trouble finding a table). They have a number of different stations with specialties from different regions.

Leaving early with Abe meant Dave and I didn’t have a ton of time to check out the culture exhibits on the upper floors. We made a run through music and then got out of there, but there are also exhibits on religion, literature, visual arts, sports, and more.

You can easily spend a full day here (if you don’t have your five year old with you), so make sure to give yourself as much time as you can. That said, if you only have a morning or an afternoon, it’s still very much worth a visit.

A Hot Afternoon, a Five Year Old, and the Mall

While Ari, Milo, and Gus spent a couple of extra hours at the NMAAHC, Dave and I tried to find ways to keep Abe occupied on what was a very hot and humid afternoon. Like…there’s a carousel!

And that fountain you see up there, in front of the National Archives, near the National Gallery of Art’s sculpture garden:

And lots of lovely little gardens tucked in all over the place:

 

But eventually we really needed to get inside and out of the heat. There are, of course, approximately a million excellent, excellent museums on and around the mall, but we didn’t have a whole lot of time and Abe was kind of museumed out….so we just made a quick visit to the Smithsonian Castle:

In addition to being a cool building, the castle serves as a visitors center with information about all the Smithsonian sites and it houses a sampling from the Smithsonian’s vast collections:

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Jefferson Memorial (and FDR, briefly)

We’d seen most of the big monuments in DC before, but we’d never made it to Jefferson before. And we like complicated legacies (see: LBJ library), so we decided to check it out. It didn’t hurt that parking is relatively easy for the Jefferson Memorial, with several large lots available nearby that were nearly empty when we got there between 9 and 10 in the morning. This gave us three hours to check out the Jefferson Memorial and environs.

It was a cloudy day, but the actual rain held off until we were out of the city for the day, so it made for less oppressive temperatures and dramatic skies for photos:

Milo’s 15th birthday coincided with our DC stop, and he was happier than he looks here to be checking out some history on his big day:

We checked out the small museum under the monument and then the monument itself. I took many pictures.

Speaking of complicated legacies….unlike at Monticello, Jefferson gets off pretty easy in his memorial. But the kids know all about complicated legacies. They read the quotation around the inside of the rotunda, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” …and decided that the three stars before and after it are actually asterisks, “ *except not Black people *and I really do mean men *yeah, let me be clear: white dudes is all I’m talking about here”

Gus wore his Monticello shirt:

After the Jefferson Memorial, we strolled farther down toward the Mall, saying hello to some baby geese along the way:

And admiring this funny bridge guy:

But we had an important goal in mind. On our last trip to DC, four years earlier, I took one of my favorite pictures of Abe ever with FDR and Fala the Scottie at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial:

Goal for this day was to recreate the shot. Mission accomplished!

Library of Congress

With that task completed, we headed back to the parking area for a picnic lunch and then drove over to find parking near our next stop, the Library of Congress. We again had pretty good luck with parking and found some on the street a couple of blocks away (our van is too tall for most parking decks, particularly in big cities, so we’re at the mercy of street parking).

They offer assorted guided tours of the Library of Congress, but we just kind of wandered around and gawked at everything for awhile. Abe was having a very tough day (and a very tough week, really. He is….not at his best at the beginnings of long trips. There is a settling in period), so we again split up some so the older kids could explore more exhibits than we were able to get to. But we all saw many pretty things. And a Gutenberg Bible.

I was kind of surprised to discover that the Main Reading Room–that iconic room that shows up in movies all the time–isn’t somewhere you can just walk into. I mean, I guess this makes sense, or no one would be able to get any work done in there with all the tourists milling about. You can use it, but you have to get a “Reader Identification Card” first. If you want to take a look, you can, but only from behind glass from a single overhead viewing location, and, at least when we were there, there’s a line to stand in before you go up for a quick look.

Abe was very excited to discover the tunnel that leads from the Library of Congress to the Capitol Building, so we all agreed to walk down it with him, even though it meant going through security again.

Don’t tell Abe I said so, but there’s really nothing that exciting about taking the tunnel to the Capitol. Unless you have a ticket for a tour, you can’t see much of the Capitol once you get over there, and there’s not much for you to do but turn around and come back.

Which is not a very dramatic note on which to conclude our whirlwind DC tour, but….there you have it. Next up I’ll have a review for you of the campground we stayed at outside of the city at Lake Fairfax Park.

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