Off to Niagara Falls

Haven't really posted much lately....wedding costs cut into travel fund quite a bit...but it was so worth it..wedding was wonderful, had a great time with all our guests. Have done a lot of FL trips since then, mostly business related...have lots of photos www.kodakgallery.com/kathyhume Understand site will be switched over to Shuttlefly soon..not sure of new address. Anyway...next big adventure is Niagara falls to watch my brother, Tom's friend Nik Wallenda walk across horseshoe falls. Will be televised on ABC at 9am Friday, June 15th. Will post photos and travel tips after trip 9/4/12....well Nik did it in spectacular style (even hampered by the harness) but I had to bale due to cancer diagnosis and surgery. Good news is got it all and now in recovery mode and hope to be traveling soon.

At the Zoo

for a zoo map, copy this into your browser:

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Visit/ZooMap/NationalZooMap07.pdf

Animal exhibits are open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day.

From the hotels....Wardman...go left out of the hotel and walk about 3 blocks uphill
From the Dupont Residence Inn...see below especially the tip!

Take the Red Line to the Woodley Park/Zoo/Adams Morgan stop or the Cleveland Park stop. The Zoo entrance lies halfway between these stops, and both are a short walk from the Zoo.
Tip: It's an uphill walk from Woodley Park to the Zoo, and a level one from Cleveland Park. We suggest you arrive at Cleveland Park and leave from either Metro station.
If you exit at the Woodley Park–Zoo/Adams Morgan stop, walk north (away from McDonald's and CVS). The Zoo is about three blocks from the stop, on the right (east) side of Connecticut Avenue.

Note: It's an uphill walk of about one-third of a mile from Woodley Park. You may prefer to take a bus from this station to the Zoo. When you arrive at Woodley Park, cross Connecticut Avenue and catch an L2 or L4 bus, in the direction of Chevy Chase Circle. The third stop is the Zoo stop and is right at the Zoo entrance.
If you exit at the Cleveland Park stop, take the exit on the east side of the street and walk south, toward the Uptown movie theater and the restaurants that line Connecticut Avenue (away from 7-11 and the Exxon station). The Zoo is on the east side of the street, about three blocks from the stop, after a bridge and just past a large apartment building.

International DC

Starting with the Saturday of the wedding and for the Month of May, many of the embassies will have open houses with opportunities to tour the building, sample food and enjoy music. You have a lot of time of Saturday to enjoy....just remember to be at the church by 5pm!

click on the title above to open up the brochure

More things to do Wedding Weekend

This is the exhibit that is at the museum where the reception is being held. During the cocktail hour you can take a tour. Two docents will be on hand to answer questions.

Exhibition - Fran, Have You Supplied the Table? Food, Service, and Etiquette in the Federal Era
Dumbarton House Museum
September 17, 2009 - June 12, 2010

All day Exhibition - Delivering Hope: FDR & Stamps of the Great Depression
National Postal Museum
June 9, 2009 - June 6, 2010
FeeFree

Exhibition - Fran, Have You Supplied the Table? Food, Service, and Etiquette in the Federal Era
Dumbarton House Museum
September 17, 2009 - June 12, 2010

Exhibition - The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: Selected Works
National Gallery of Art
October 1, 2009 - May 2, 2010
FeeFree

Exhibition: Herblock!
Library of Congress
October 13, 2009 - May 1, 2010
FeeFree

Exhibition - Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort
National Museum of the American Indian
October 16, 2009 - August 8, 2010

Exhibition - Contemporary Japanese Fashion: The Mary Baskett Collection
The Textile Museum
October 17, 2009 - October 11, 2010
FeeFree with a suggested donation of $5

Exhibition - Sèvres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain, 1750 - 2000
Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens
October 20, 2009 - May 30, 2010
Fee$12; Senior $10; Full-time students $7; Children ages 6 - 18 $5

Exhibition - Directions: John Gerrard
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
November 5, 2009 - May 31, 2010

Exhibition - The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present
Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum
November 9, 2009 - July 4, 2010
FeeFree

Exhibition - IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas
National Museum of the American Indian
November 10, 2009 - May 23, 2010

Theater: One Destiny
Ford's Theatre
March 29, 2010 - 10:30am - May 22, 2010 - 12:00pm
Fee$5

Exhibit: Jazz at the Philharmonic
National Museum of American History
April 1, 2010 - May 31, 2010
FeeFree

Exhibit: IndiVisible—African-Native American Lives in the Americas
National Museum of the American Indian
April 1, 2010 - 10:30am - May 31, 2010 - 5:30pm
FeeFree

Exhibit: Bart O’Reilly - Old Lines from the Luminous State
Flashpoint Gallery
April 2, 2010 - May 8, 2010
FeeFree

Exhibition: In Our Time (In unserer Zeit) Photographs
Goethe-Institut Washington
April 5, 2010 - 9:00am - May 28, 2010 - 3:00pm
FeeFree

Tour: Hillwood Estate Spring Gardens
Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens
April 6, 2010 - 10:30am - June 13, 2010 - 10:30am
Fee$0-$12

Exhibition: Scattered Evidence - Excavating Antioch-on-the-Orontes
Dumbarton Oaks Museum
April 7, 2010 - 2:00pm - October 10, 2010 - 5:00pm
FeeFree

Exhibition: "Italy: A Journey Through the Layers of Time" - Photographic Images by Diane Epstein
Susan Calloway Fine Arts
April 9, 2010 - 12:00pm - May 8, 2010 - 6:00pm
FeeFree

All times Exhibition: Mexico 2010 - A Vision of the 21st Century
Inter-American Development Bank
March 29, 2010 - 12:00pm - April 30, 2010 - 12:00pm
FeeFree

Elvis Fans..check this out

Now Open
Location: Big Screen Theater & Special Exhibits
On Display: Through Feb. 14, 2011


WASHINGTON — Experience the power of Elvis Presley and the explosive impact he had on music and popular culture in the Newseum's newest exhibit "Elvis! His Groundbreaking, Hip-Shaking, Newsmaking Story."

The exhibit opens in what would have been Presley's 75th birthday year. It tells the story of Presley as he was portrayed in the news media and how his music and physicality pushed the boundaries of mainstream taste and free expression.

Produced in collaboration with Elvis Presley Enterprises, the exhibit includes a number of rare objects from the vaults of Graceland that have never been publicly displayed, including private telegrams, letters and scrapbooks that chronicle Presley's rise as a music and media sensation.

Exhibit Highlights

• A Newseum-produced video featuring vintage footage of Presley will be broadcast on the 90-foot-long video wall in the Robert H. and Clarice Smith Big Screen Theater.
• Rare photographs and original newspapers and magazines covering Presley's career.
• Presley's iconic 1957 Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
• The "American Eagle" jumpsuit and cape Presley wore during rehearsals for his "Aloha From Hawaii" concert in 1973.
• The gold-and-diamond belt presented to Presley in 1969 for breaking Las Vegas attendance records.
Plan your visit and buy your tickets now

more things to do in DC during the Wedding Weekend

For those Georgia O'Keefe fans (Sunny!) there is an exhibit at the Phillips:

Encounter superb works of modern art in an intimate setting at The Phillips Collection, an internationally recognized museum in Washington's vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood.


Paintings by Renoir and Rothko, Bonnard and O'Keeffe, van Gogh and Diebenkorn are among the many stunning impressionist and modern works that fill the museum's distinctive building, which combines extensive new galleries with the family home of its founder, Duncan Phillips. The collection continues to develop with selective new acquisitions, many by contemporary artists.


Special exhibitions and frequent changes in the arrangement of the permanent collection mean that there's something new on every visit to the Phillips. The museum's Center for the Study of Modern Art offers stimulating Conversations with Artists, symposia, lectures, and more, while Sunday Concerts, Phillips after 5 programs, and other events provide additional food for thought. The museum also produces a vigorous, award-winning program of educational outreach that serves more than 6,000 students and teachers a year and indirectly reaches many tens of thousands more.


The Phillips Collection opened to the public in 1921 and is America's first museum of modern art. It is a private institution that is not a part of the federal government. It relies for support on admission and program fees, endowment income, and generous assistance from individual donors, corporations, foundations, and others.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

(February 6-May 9, 2010)
Although painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), a central figure in 20th-century art, is best known for simplified images of recognizable objects, her contributions to American abstraction over the course of her long career were radical. Her approach-in paintings, drawings, and watercolors-was determined in 1915, when she decided that her art would record her feelings, rather than the appearance of things. For the remainder of her career, she looked to art, whether abstract or objective, to express emotions for which words seemed inadequate.
In her first abstractions, a series of non-objective charcoal drawings, O'Keeffe reduced her palette to black and white. She filled her compositions with fluid, curvilinear forms reminiscent of Art Nouveau. In 1916, responding to the elemental landscape of western Texas, O'Keeffe reintroduced color into her watercolors. By magnifying and tightly cropping her images, a framing device used by photographers, she found the means to express simultaneously the vastness of nature, the immensity of her own response to it, and a powerful sense of being one with it. Two years later, seeking recognition as a painter in the circle of modern art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she moved to New York and took up oils again.

Unwelcome critical interpretations of her work as expressive of her sexuality and a limited market for abstraction led O'Keeffe to turn away from pure abstraction in the 1920s and 1930s. After 1923, she rarely showed her early abstractions. Indeed, between 1935 and 1941, she produced no abstractions at all. Beginning in 1929, O'Keeffe spent long stretches of time in New Mexico, finally moving there in 1949. It proved to be an inexhaustible source of subjects for her mature works. She approached these as she had her most abstract works, through her feelings, using many of the same stylistic means. As she said, "I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it."
Likely stung when critic Clement Greenberg trounced her in 1940 for having chosen representation over abstraction, O'Keeffe returned to it in1942, painting forms she found in the natural world that corresponded to abstract forms in her imagination. With the market more receptive to abstract art, she began to exhibit her abstractions again. By the late 1950s and 1960s she was working almost exclusively in an abstract style, in mural-sized aerial views of clouds and a minimalist, geometric series of patio door paintings. The fields of color of her radical late works set a precedent for a younger generation of abstract artists in the 1960s.

Included in the exhibition are more than 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe, dating from 1915 to the late 1970s, and 12 photographic portraits of her by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

In conjunction with Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, co-organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

(February 6-May 9, 2010)
Although painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), a central figure in 20th-century art, is best known for simplified images of recognizable objects, her contributions to American abstraction over the course of her long career were radical. Her approach-in paintings, drawings, and watercolors-was determined in 1915, when she decided that her art would record her feelings, rather than the appearance of things. For the remainder of her career, she looked to art, whether abstract or objective, to express emotions for which words seemed inadequate.
In her first abstractions, a series of non-objective charcoal drawings, O'Keeffe reduced her palette to black and white. She filled her compositions with fluid, curvilinear forms reminiscent of Art Nouveau. In 1916, responding to the elemental landscape of western Texas, O'Keeffe reintroduced color into her watercolors. By magnifying and tightly cropping her images, a framing device used by photographers, she found the means to express simultaneously the vastness of nature, the immensity of her own response to it, and a powerful sense of being one with it. Two years later, seeking recognition as a painter in the circle of modern art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, she moved to New York and took up oils again.

Unwelcome critical interpretations of her work as expressive of her sexuality and a limited market for abstraction led O'Keeffe to turn away from pure abstraction in the 1920s and 1930s. After 1923, she rarely showed her early abstractions. Indeed, between 1935 and 1941, she produced no abstractions at all. Beginning in 1929, O'Keeffe spent long stretches of time in New Mexico, finally moving there in 1949. It proved to be an inexhaustible source of subjects for her mature works. She approached these as she had her most abstract works, through her feelings, using many of the same stylistic means. As she said, "I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at-not copy it."
Likely stung when critic Clement Greenberg trounced her in 1940 for having chosen representation over abstraction, O'Keeffe returned to it in1942, painting forms she found in the natural world that corresponded to abstract forms in her imagination. With the market more receptive to abstract art, she began to exhibit her abstractions again. By the late 1950s and 1960s she was working almost exclusively in an abstract style, in mural-sized aerial views of clouds and a minimalist, geometric series of patio door paintings. The fields of color of her radical late works set a precedent for a younger generation of abstract artists in the 1960s.

Included in the exhibition are more than 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by O'Keeffe, dating from 1915 to the late 1970s, and 12 photographic portraits of her by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

In conjunction with Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, co-organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

Tours to take in DC

On Foot

A Tour de Force (tel. 703/525-2948; www.atourdeforce.com) is historian and raconteur Jeanne Fogel's 25-year-old company. She offers various modes of transport, from walking to bus, SUV, and limo tours. Fogel custom designs the route around the city per your request and size of group, from a romantic tour for a couple to a traditional sightseeing excursion for a convention crowd. Fogel (or her stand-in) peppers her narration with little-known anecdotes and facts about neighborhoods, historic figures, and the most visited sites. Call for rates.

Spies of Washington Walking Tours (tel. 703/569-1875; www.spiesofwashingtontour.com) offers four walking tours that focus on espionage-related sites in Georgetown and around the White House, Pennsylvania Avenue, Capitol Hill, and the Russian Embassy areas. Carol Bessette, a retired Air Force intelligence officer, conducts the tours, which cost $12 per person. Private tours and bus tours are also available.

Anecdotal History Tours of Washington, D.C. (tel. 301/294-9514; www.dcsightseeing.com) offers 2-hour walks through the streets of Georgetown, Adams-Morgan, and other locations guided by author/historian Anthony S. Pitch. Inquire about private tours. Rates are $15 per person.

Segway Tours (tel. 877/SEG-TOUR; www.citysegwaytours.com/washington) are available March through November. Though technically they are "on foot," Segways are self-propelling scooters that operate based on "dynamic stabilization" technology, which uses your body movements. Tours last 4 hours, cost $70 per person, and include training; age 16 and up.

By Bus

Tourmobile -- Best-known and least expensive, Tourmobile Sightseeing (tel. 888/868-7707 or 202/554-5100; www.tourmobile.com) is a good choice if you're looking for an easy-on/easy-off tour of major sites, especially since security concerns have made the already limited parking nearly nonexistent. The comfortable red, white, and blue sightseeing trams travel to as many as 24 attractions (the company changes its schedule and number of stops depending on whether sites are open for public tours), including Arlington National Cemetery. Tourmobile is the only narrated sightseeing shuttle tour authorized by the National Park Service.

The company offers a number of different tours, but the most popular is the American Heritage Tour, which stops at 21 sites on or near the National Mall and at 3 sites in Arlington Cemetery. (Again, the number of stops may be fewer than 21, if regularly scheduled stops are not open for public tours due to increased security.) Normally, stops include the memorials and Washington Monument, Union Station, the National Gallery, most of the Smithsonian museums (National Air and Space, National Museum of Natural History, and the Arts and Industries Building/Hirshhorn Museum), the Capitol, the White House Visitor Center, and several other locations. In Arlington Cemetery, the bus stops at the Kennedy grave sites, the Tomb of the Unknowns, and Arlington House.
You can purchase tickets at the Union Station and Washington Monument booths, or inside the Arlington National Cemetery Visitor Center, or, for a small surcharge, order your ticket in advance from Ticketmaster at tel. 800/551-7328 or www.ticketmaster.com. Or if you'd prefer, just pay your driver when you first get on the bus. Hop on a Tourmobile at any of the designated locations, then get off at any stop to visit monuments or buildings. When you finish exploring each area, just show your ticket and climb aboard the next Tourmobile that comes along. The buses travel in a loop, serving each stop about every 15 to 30 minutes. One fare allows you to use the buses all day. The charge for the American Heritage Tour is $27 for anyone 12 and older, $13 for children 3 to 11. For Arlington Cemetery only, those 12 and older pay $7.50, children $3.75. Children 2 and under ride free. Buses follow circuits from the Capitol to Arlington Cemetery and back. Well-trained and personable narrators give commentaries about sights along the route and answer questions.
The trams are heated in winter, but they're not air-conditioned in summer; and though the windows stay open, they can get hot and uncomfortable. Readers also report that Tourmobiles, being the largest trams, take a long time to load and unload passengers, which can be frustrating to those anxious to see the sights.
Tourmobiles operate 9:30am to 4:30pm, daily year-round, except Christmas. (In the busy tourist season, Tourmobile sometimes extends its hours.) Call Tourmobile or visit the website for further information about other tours and their rates.

Old Town Trolley -- Old Town Trolley tours (tel. 202/832-9800; www.historictours.com) offer fixed-price, on-off service as you travel in three loops around the city, with a transfer point at the Lincoln Memorial stop to go on to Arlington Cemetery and a second transfer point at Ford's Theatre to get to Georgetown and to Washington National Cathedral. Many hotels sell tickets; otherwise, you can purchase tickets online or at the Old Town Trolley Tour booths at Union Station, the D.C. Visitor Center in the Ronald Reagan Building, and many other places around town. Buses operate daily from 9am to 4:30pm, extended to 5:30pm in summer. The cost is $32 for adults, $16 for children 4 to 12, free for children 3 and under. You can buy tickets online in advance and at a discount, and use those e-tickets to board at any of the stops on the route. The full tour, which is narrated, takes 2 hours (if you don't get off and tour the sites, obviously), and trolleys come by every 30 minutes or so. Old Town Trolley tours cost more than Tourmobile tours, perhaps because the buses travel to neighborhoods and attractions away from the Mall.

By Boat

Since Washington is a river city, why not see it by boat? Potomac cruises allow sweeping vistas of the monuments and memorials, Georgetown, the Kennedy Center, and other Washington sights. Read the information below carefully, since not all boat cruises offer guided tours. Some of the following boats leave from the Washington waterfront and some from Old Town Alexandria:

Spirit of Washington Cruises, Pier 4 at 6th and Water streets SW (tel. 866/302-2469 or 202/554-8000; www.spiritcruises.com; Metro: Waterfront), offers a variety of trips daily, including evening dinner, lunch, brunch, and moonlight dance cruises, as well as a half-day excursion to Mount Vernon and back. Lunch and dinner cruises include a 40-minute musical revue.

The Spirit of Washington is a luxury climate-controlled harbor cruise ship with carpeted decks and huge panoramic windows designed for sightseeing. There are three well-stocked bars onboard.

Potomac Party Cruises (tel. 703/683-6076; www.dandydinnerboat.com) operates the Dandy and Nina's Dandy, both climate-controlled, all-weather, glassed-in floating restaurants that run year-round. Lunch, evening dinner/dance, and special charter cruises are available daily. You board both vessels in Old Town Alexandria, at the Prince Street pier, between Duke and King streets. Trips range from a 2 1/2-hour weekday lunch cruise to a 3-hour Saturday dinner cruise.

Odyssey (tel. 866/306-2469; www.odysseycruises.com) was designed specifically to glide under the bridges that cross the Potomac. The boat looks like a glass bullet, with its snub-nosed port and its streamlined 240-foot-long glass body. The wraparound see-through walls and ceiling allow for great views. You board the Odyssey at the Gangplank Marina, on Washington's waterfront at 6th and Water streets SW (Metro: Waterfront). Cruises available include lunch, Sunday brunch, and dinner excursions, with live entertainment provided during each cruise.

The Potomac Riverboat Company (tel. 877/511-2628 or 703/684-0580; www.potomacriverboatco.com) offers three narrated tours April through October. The Matthew Hayes and the Miss Mallor have a 90-minute round-trip tour past Washington monuments and memorials; the Admiral Tilp is on an 80-minute round-trip tour of Old Town Alexandria's waterfront; and the Miss Christin cruises to Mount Vernon, where you hop off and reboard after you've toured the estate. You board the boats at the pier behind the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria at the foot of King Street, or, for the Washington monuments and memorials tour, Georgetown's Washington Harbour. A concession stand selling light refreshments and beverages is open during the cruises.

The Capitol River Cruise's Nightingales (tel. 800/405-5511 or 301/460-7447; www.capitolrivercruises.com) are historic 65-foot steel riverboats that can accommodate 90 people. The Nightingales' narrated jaunts depart Georgetown's Washington Harbour every hour on the hour, from noon to 9pm, April through October (the 9pm outing is offered in summer months only). The 45-minute narrated tour travels past the monuments and memorials to National Airport and back. A snack bar onboard sells light refreshments, beer, wine, and sodas; you're welcome to bring your own picnic aboard. To get here, take Metro to Foggy Bottom and then walk into Georgetown, following Pennsylvania Avenue, which becomes M Street. Turn left on 31st Street NW and follow to the Washington Harbour complex on the water.

A Boat on Wheels -- Old Town Trolley also operates DC Ducks (tel. 202/832-9800; www.dcducks.com), which feature unique land and water tours of Washington aboard the DUKW, an amphibious army vehicle (boat with wheels) from World War II that accommodates 30 passengers. Ninety-minute guided tours aboard the open-air canopied craft include a land portion taking in major sights -- the Capitol, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, White House, and Smithsonian museums -- and a 30-minute Potomac cruise. Purchase tickets inside Union Station at the information desk; board the vehicle just outside the main entrance to Union Station. Hours vary, but departures usually follow a daily 11am, 1pm, and 3pm schedule (Mar-Oct).

By Bike
Bike the Sites, Inc. (tel. 202/842-2453; www.bikethesites.com) offers a more active way to see Washington, in season, from March to November. The company has designed several different biking tours of the city, including the popular Capital Sites Ride, which takes you past museums, memorials, the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court. The ride takes 3 hours, covers 7 to 8 miles, and costs $40 per adult, $30 per child 12 and under. Bike the Sites provides you with a comfort mountain bicycle fitted to your size, bike helmet, water bottle, light snack, and two guides to lead the ride. All tours start from the rear plaza, 12th Street NW side of the Old Post Office Pavilion, which is located at 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW (Metro: Federal Triangle, on the Blue and Orange Line). Guides impart historical and anecdotal information as you go. The company rents bikes to those who want to go their own, unnarrated way for $7 an hour ($15 minimum) or $45 a day, including helmet, bike, lock, and pump. It also customizes guided bike rides to suit your tour specifications.