Rainy Monday

[ellarien]

I must admit I'm rather charmed by the realization that the National Mall, the very heart of the capital, is almost entirely given over to museums. Not government offices, or a parade ground, but museums full of children and tourists.

It was pouring with rain this morning -- not a bad day for a visit to the National Air and Space Museum, which is just down the road from the hotel.

Space Ship One Air and Space Museum	Astronaut helmet
Skylab mockup	Satellite from lunar program
Apollo/Soyuz meetup	Hubble space telescope model

I stayed in the museum for longer than I planned because it was pouring with rain outside, but eventually it let up a bit. I wandered over to the Sculpture Garden on the other side of the Mall, and admired fountains and sculpture and some rather lovely irises in a gentle and not too chilly rain.

Sculpture in the Sculpture Garden	Iris in the Sculture Garden

Then I spent a couple of hours in the Natural History Museum.

Lively taxidermy -- antelope	T'lan Imass turtle
Pleiosaur	Seal
Amethyst	Crystals
Crystals	Tourmaline
Washington Monument from Natural History Museum	Giant Sea Star from the Galapagos
Totem pole In a stairwell, of course. Was it the British Museum that did the same thing, or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts?	Triceratops (model) skull outside Natural History Museum

By closing time, the rain had let up and there was even a little watery sunshine as I wandered up the mall towards the Capitol, a bit surprised by the overgrown grass. Maybe it's just been raining too much to mow it properly. There was some kind of religious ... thing ... going on on the lawn in front of the Capitol, and an amplified voice was reading from the Bible about the fall of king Saul as I admired the reflections in a body of water that turned out not to be the Reflecting Pool.

Capitol reflected.	General Grant
Military embellishments	Black tulip outside the US Botanical Gardens
Sculpture outside the National Museum of the American Indian	National Museum of the American Indian

Comments

Great Layout!

[lapswood.livejournal.com]

What a fab set of pictures. How does One get them into such a neat grid, complete with captions on One's LJ page? If too long to explain with text then please could you provide link to a good online tutorial. Thanks!

Re: Great Layout!

[ellarien]

Thanks!

I used the LJ photo gallery and the 'Post to LJ' function, which generates the HTML table code for you, and then split up the big table by adding a few extra tags. There isn't an easy way to do the same thing with Flickr that I know of, but the tags are table to open the table, tr to start a new row, and td to start a cell, all in angle-brackets of course and to be closed with the same thing preceded by a front slash.