Today on Travel Tuesdays we take a quick look at Washington, DC.

Chris and I spent 6 days last week in Maryland, traveling every day into Washington, DC. You might have thought we would have seen quite a lot of the nation’s capitol. But in fact, both of us spent most of the time in the Library of Congress, working on research for my planned project on American women female photographers circa 1900. (Thanks, Chris, for spending so much time on this!) But since today is Travel Tuesday, I thought I’d at least share a few things we did see on Sunday, the one day we spent being tourists, instead of researchers.

We visited 3 musueums in 7 hours: the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian. We started in that last one and visited a very interesting exhibit on the Great Inca Road. The exhibits were interactive and well-done, and probably aimed at kids more than adulta. But if that’s their target audience, they’ve done a good job. One unexpected aspect to the museum is the cafeteria/restaurant, which serves food representative of the indigenous populations of all the Americas. We tried a stew made with beans, duck and roasted mackeral. Quite tasty.

Anyway, the only photos I took during most of the week were of the Capital building, as seen walking to the train station to the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress buildings

Capitol under construction

Overall, though, the building wasn’t too photogenic with that scaffolding. However, since I was researching photos done by women doing pictorialist, artistic photography, I was inspired just now to play a little with this other photo of the Capitol:

Capital skies

But overall, not the most photogenic moment in D.C.

However, on Sunday, we walked from the American Indian museum to the other museums, taking a path across the mall. There we saw a more typical tourist scene, so I was tempted to take a more typical tourist photo:

Washington Monument

Of course, today when looking through the photos this next one was my favorite.  Not exactly typical – but you can at least see a Washington monument in the distance.

Monument Tree, Washington, DC

Anyway, that was the trip to D.C. Fun, tiring, and very inspiring with the research we did last week. I’ll try to write up a bit more about that later this week. In the meantime, enjoy this quick tourist trip on a Travel Tuesday to D.C.