Revisiting D.C.'s Newseum After Several Years Away

Being a passionate journalist and communications professional, it's flat-out crazy that I don't visit the Newseum in Washington DC, where I live, as frequently as at least once a year.

It has probably been five years since I set foot in there, when I helped run a press conference for the World Resources Institute. Even though it's one of the only museums in D.C. that you have to pay for, and it's a fairly steep $25 entrance fee, it's well worth it.

Unless you read all the front-page spreads of many of the newspapers from around the world, it's actually a relatively quick museum to make your way through. There are so many interesting and diverse things to see, always told with an element of how journalism or journalists fit into the larger story.

The first thing on display right now when walking in is a piece of the Berlin Wall, and also a tower from near one of the Checkpoint Charlie sites.

Next up our displays of the funny pages, the counterculture of the 1960s, and Vietnam coverage from that same era. Those each could actually be much larger exhibits, or exhibits of their own filling the entire museum.

Also of note is a display from the civil rights era featuring a jail cell door that held Martin Luther King Jr. and a lunch counter from Nashville, Tennessee where protesters sat before fights and riots broke out. There's a long theater-seating area that displaying many screens of live TV news. When I walked through, Hillary Clinton was stumping in Iowa.

There is amazing display of the RCA tower that fell from one of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Accompanying that is a spellbinding video of the one and only working journalist (amazingly) who died in the catastrophe, as he rushed towards the towers to take photos.

Joined by my dad and brother Tim, we didn't expect to sit in a room for nearly an hour watching a documentary, but that's exactly what we did, as the movie on the history of sports journalism was two fascinating to stop watching.

Finally, We stopped in to view the Washington Nationals baseball exhibit, which was quite a bit more interesting than actually watching the team on the field these days.

Final verdict: don't miss the Newseum when you visit Washington DC. It's a little bit of an under-looked gem.

Pricey Air and Space Museum Gets Our Stamp of Approval

Jackson and I decided to take advantage of the nice weather today and finally make our first visit to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (named after the guy who paid for it) Dulles Airport annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

It was well worth it, even though the place is not cheap, especially by our Washington DC standards of free museums. But after $15 for parking, $14 to take a simulation space flight, $25 for toys (that arguable work) and candy in the gift shop, and $10 at the in-museum McDonald's, it felt a little like we should have just gone to Six Flags instead.

Complaining aside, our visit was super fun. On the space flight, we got into a tube and watched a movie with 3-D glasses on our faces while the thing bounced around for a bit. It worked. Towards the end, Jackson looked up and me and asked, "Daddy, are we in space?" I assured him we were, for what it's worth. He wanted to take some of the other rides, but he wasn't tall enough, saving my pocketbook just a tad.

We loved all the spacemen, the "shark plane," the elevators, and the high walkways. But the really awe-inspiring highlights were the Enola Gay, famed for dropping the first bomb on Hiroshima, and the newly-arrived and massive Space Shuttle Discovery, which flew over our home just a month ago en route from Florida.

And the whole experience was aided by Jackson's steady stream of super-happy goofiness, and the monkey stamp he gave himself right on the forehead.

This museum is a must-see for all kids.