Spys in the News....
Yes new trip (flights) booked, very exciting !!....ok thanks for being patient, back to this trip....
We started our day with breakfast at JW Marriot. Great place for a hearty American Breakfast. Today was DS day in DC. We were going to the International Spy Museum and time permitting also the Newseum. We had pre-purchased our Spy Museum tickets and we got general admission and also Operation Spy.
Operation Spy is a one-hour live action spy adventure. This adrenaline-fueled mission gives you the chance to become an intelligence officer on an international mission.
We had booked 11:40 for our Operation Spy Mission. We arrived early and thought we could go through the museum before the mission. We were able to get through most of the museum before we had to be down at the foyer for Operation Spy. The museum itself has a lot of information about this clandestine world. I personally found parts of it quite interesting with other parts a little “ho-hum” so to speak. Operation Spy was something a little different. You have a group of people and your are then allocated into smaller groups to perform certain “tasks” through a set with footage, audio recordings and narration from a personal guide. It is certainly geared towards kids and I’d say early teens is when the interest would start to wane a little. DS enjoyed it and like I said it was something a little different. It isn’t something I would do again after having done it once. I didn’t actually take any photos at the museum. I’m not sure if that was because it wasn’t permitted or I just didn’t. After Operation Spy we did go back to see the rest of the museum. They had a James Bond Exhibit which was interesting and I was a 007 fan in my younger years, so that was interesting to see also.
Overall, the Spy Museum is worth a few hours, though in hindsight with our tight schedule we might have skipped this for something else, but now we are going back to DC, it really doesn’t matter!
We got out of the Spy museum around 1pm and we made our way to the Newseum. This is a Museum dedicated to News & Journalism. This is right up DS alley as he wants to be a journalist and has so since he was in grade 2. We didn’t pre purchase our tickets, mainly because we were not 100% sure that we were going to get here as we didn’t know how much time we would spend at the Spy Museum. We were able to get he “
AAA” rate, though the attendant didn’t recognise our RACQ motor club card until we showed them the small AAA logo and code on the back. This gave us a small discount off the ticket price. A side note here, all of the Smithsonian Museums in DC are free to get into, the two museums we went to during our stay were both commercial museums and had an admission fee!
There was a cafeteria type eatery inside the Newseum, so we thought we could get some lunch here. Unfortunately, the selection was greatly reduced as they had a gas problem and their main cooking facilities were not operation, but we were able to get some food which replenished our stores, so we could then make our way through the Newseum.
It was recommended that we started at the theatre which showed a short film on the Newseum and the best way to work your way around it. They recommended you take the large elevators to the top level (there are 6 levels from memory) and work your way down. Now I hadn’t read too much about the actual exhibits that were in the Newseum. When we came out of the orientation video, we entered an exhibit which truly blew me away. We stepped out and around a corner and here were about 8 section of the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin Wall Gallery tells the gripping story of how news and information helped topple a closed and oppressive society. Featured are eight 12-foot-high concrete sections of the original wall — the largest display of unaltered portions of the wall outside of Germany. A three-story East German guard tower that loomed near Checkpoint Charlie — Berlin’s best-known East-West crossing — stands nearby.
I think I was just shocked that I was not expecting this type of exhibit here. While I had known the circumstances of the toppling of the Berlin Wall, to actually see and later touch it was really unexpected and then reading some of the stories that went along with the exhibit it set me back a little.
Death Tower from Checkpoint Charlie
These are from the “Inside Today’s FBI”
From the Boston Marathon bombing to the Internet’s sinister Silk Road, go behind the scenes with the FBI to explore how crime and crime-fighting have evolved in the post-9/11 age. As the nation’s top crime-fighting force embarks on its second century, the exhibit will explore how the FBI detects and disrupts terrorists both at home and abroad, and thwarts powerful cyber criminals who steal data and money.
They have a wall where they have that days the front pages from major newspapers across the word. Here is the SMH the day we were there.
Pennsylvania Ave taken from a balcony. It was absolutely freezing out there.
The National Archives
This is the “Hurry up Dad it’s freezing cold expression!”
The Capitol under repair
