KatelynNovember 8, 2019 – November 10, 2019
Where We Stayed: Hyatt Place Washington DC / National Mall
Trip Highlights:
- One Final Good-Bye to the Newseum
- Finding the Abe Lincoln Pressed Penny
- FDR Monument
- United States Postal Museum
Favorite Restaurants:
In November 2019, we met up with Shannon for a quick weekend trip to Washington D.C. to say goodbye to our favorite D.C. museum, the Newseum, that had announced that they would be closing at the end of the year.
We all converged on the city on Friday night after work (Sam and I flying, Shannon taking the train) and crashed so we could start the morning fresh and get to the museum right as it opened. Bright and early Saturday morning we walked over to the Newseum and began our goodbye visit. The Newseum was a museum that celebrated the freedom of the press and history of news media. All three of us have enjoyed going to this museum in the past, and were sad to see it go. We spent most of the day exploring the top couple floors, taking only a quick break for a lunch at Nando’s.
Shannon had to catch a train home that night, so Sam and I went with her to Union Station to catch her train. I’ve been collecting pressed pennies from my travels for a few years now, and had always thought it would be funny to get a pressed penny with Abe Lincoln pressed into the penny (long story, but I found it funny that you would be pressing an Abe Lincoln into an Abe Lincoln coin). I hadn’t been able to find one yet, but prior to this trip did a bit more sleuthing and discovered that Union Station had an Abe Lincoln design at their pressed penny machines, so we made a quick pit stop so I could finally get my penny.
The next day, Sam and I first took a walk around the basin to the FDR monument. I hadn’t visited that monument yet, and it was nearly deserted, so we had a good time wandering through the halls.
We ventured back to the Newseum for a few additional hours to see the last few exhibits we hadn’t been able to see the day before. We took a few photos and said our last few goodbyes before heading out.
With a few more hours to kill before our flight, we decided to check out a few of the D.C. museums that we had never been to before. We started with the National Postal Museum, which is a small Smithsonian museum next to Union Station. It’s home to the National Stamp Collection, which was connected to an actually pretty neat exhibit about the history of stamps and stamp collection. The rest of the museum was dated, but still pretty cool to walk through.
Our final stop was the National Portrait Gallery as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which are connected. We quickly walked through the President’s portrait gallery and checked out an interesting piece of art on the American Art side that featured neon lights outlining the United States.
While we were having a great day, things took an unfortunate turn. We had been killing time over the past few hours before our flight, that was scheduled to leave around 8 p.m. While taking a break in the lobby of the National Portrait Gallery, we were checking in on the Southwest app and discovered that our flight had been cancelled several hours before, and it looked like most of the other flights home were booked out. We quickly made our way to the hotel to grab our bags and rushed to the airport to try to find a way home.
Unfortunately, the next Southwest flight home wasn’t available until over 24 hours later. But, we were able to find a way home on United with a layover through Detroit. We ended up crashing home a few hours later than we had originally planned, but it was still a great weekend celebrating a museum that we have loved before it closed.
