Planet Word and Renwick Gallery

I recently learned about the Planet Word museum in downtown Washington D.C. When I read about it, I immediately knew that I wanted to visit it! I invited my friends, Sandy and Heather, and we planned a Saturday to go.

Look at the beautiful historic building that the museum is located in!

 

 

For the museum being a museum about words it is kind of hard to describe. ;) I will say it was a very interactive and interesting museum. I highly recommend visiting it!

 

They had a wall of words where they had a voice talking to us about words and language and the lights highlighted different words depending on what he was talking about. It was super interesting. 

During part of the wall of words presentation.
 

Although we walked up the stairs to the first exhibit, we caught a glimpse of the elevator walls and decided we needed to take a ride in the elevator. :)

 

From far away it actually looked like there were bookshelves and books in the elevator, but it was not so. But it was still fun to see!

And there were some funny wordplay jokes on the wall. 🤣

At this station we sat across from each other and jokes appeared on the screen. We got a point if we made the other person laugh when telling the jokes.

Here is where we would "paint" the wall and the painting would turn into the category of painting that the brush came out of (e.g. crepuscular turns the painting to look like the twilight part of day). 

It probably doesn't make sense when I just say it, but it was really interesting to see in person!

There were a lot more parts of the museum that I did not take a picture of. But it was really cool and I think Sandy, Heather, and I spent about 3 hours in there!

After Planet Word, we ate lunch at a place nearby called Pow Pow which ended up being really disappointing. It had decent reviews online, but two out of the three of us did not like our food very much.

All I had planned for this day was Planet Word and Pow Pow. 

Since it was a nice day and it was still early afternoon, we decided to continue our adventure and visit the Renwick Gallery. 

It had been a few years since any of us had been to the Renwick Gallery and none of us had seen the current exhibit so we walked to there. (It's not too far from Planet Word).

 

The whole room was an art exhibit and part of experiencing it was laying on the floor.

At first Sandy and I were hesitant about laying on the floor (because how many people have walked over that floor and how dirty it probably was), but since we wanted the whole experience, we did it. 

 Heather didn't want to lie down on the ground for the exhibit, (which was completely understandable).

Read this picture to learn about the next three pictures. Makes you think about single use plastic items.

Read this sign to learn about the two pictures below.

 

It was really cool to see in person. It's hard to capture how cool it actually was in a picture.

After the Renwick Gallery, we went on a hunt for ice cream. Along the way we ran into the WWI memorial. I had ever seen it before. Apparently the memorial used to be much smaller, but they had recently done some renovations to it and added some new stuff to it. It was interesting!

It was a bit windy this day, so the water wasn't still to show the reflection clearly. But it was still cool!

I think this wall tells a story of a soldier during the war. Apparently the memorial is not completely finished yet, so I will need to go back there again in a couple of years to see what it looks like then.

After we finished exploring the memorial, we eventually found an ice cream place. It wasn't the best ice cream I've ever had, but I was just happy to have something other than the food we had for lunch in my stomach.

Overall it was a lovely day with good company and interesting places to explore! Thanks Heather and Sandy for joining me on this adventure!

Great Falls

Last Saturday my brother, Tim, and I went on a hike. We started at River Bend Park and hiked to Great Falls. It was about a four mile hike round trip and the scenery was beautiful!

The trail followed the Potomac River and this part of the river was really interesting!

I'm not sure what this was, but I thought it was abandoned in an interesting place.

And we made it to Great Falls! The falls are really pretty!

We stopped at all of the overlooks for the falls.

 

A little fuzzy wuzzy on the trail (I'm not sure if that's the actual nickname for these little caterpillars but I think they're kind of cute although I don't normally like caterpillars or worms).

And on the drive back from our hike we saw this car. What an awesome car! Although I never got into Pokemon as a kid, I did think Pikachu was really cute!