Update on Pentagon Tours

This is an update to my previous post on Pentagon Tours.

Most hallways of the Pentagon have some sort of historic or current operations museum-type of exhibit.  Many of the A-ring hallways are museums in and of themselves.  Me being the type of person who likes to read each and every word of every display in a museum, it would take me a loooooooong time to get through all the Pentagon exhibits have to offer.

The official Pentagon tours are excellent, but you have to sign up weeks in advance, and they are only offered Monday through Friday.  Given there are about 25,000 people working in the Pentagon, chances are there are a few more people out there like me who want to give a tour to visiting family and friends on a weekend.  If you need to give a tour yourself, you can download a PDF of a self-guided tour from the Pentagon Tours website.

However, the official tour route doesn't go to a couple of spots I highly recommend like the Pentagon Building History (2nd corridor, 3rd floor) and the Army's Living History Exhibit (2nd floor, E-Ring between the 6th and 7th corridors).  Because the Metro entrance is closed on the weekends, you have to bring your weekend visitors in through North Parking or through the 2nd Corridor entrance.  As a result, I made my own tour-route, which I will list below for anybody else who is interested.

Before I describe the tour route, I want to tell you about two other things I did (and recommend doing) to prepare for a weekend tour.

First, go follow one of the official tour groups around on a weekday.  You don't have to sign up or anything - you've got a Pentagon badge, just loiter at the back of the official tour group.  The tour guides have a fairly set script they follow, but they have a LOT of interesting tidbits of information they use to keep people's interest as they walk their route, and they've put a lot of thought and effort into what sequence to cover what.  You will get a lot of useful ideas of things to talk about with your tour group that you wouldn't get from just reading the PDF file Self-Guided Tour brochure.

Second, I made a scavenger hunt list of things for the five kids in my tour group to find.  I told them they had to write down the first three digits of the nearest office address (like "3A5xx" for the 3rd floor A ring 5th corridor) for where they found each item, so I knew they really found it and didn't just cross it off the list. 

Scavenger Hunt List

Aside:  The hardest one for my group to find was a red lightning bolt.  If you need help finding anything on the list, send me an email.  There are at least two red lightning bolts, but they're very small and hidden in big paintings.

Since the Pentagon Gift Shop is also CLOSED on the weekends, I went to the gift shop ahead of time and got some little things like hats, magnets, stickers, or pins.  When we finished with the D-Day paintings, I had them turn in their scavenger hunt sheets to me, and I gave them an oral quiz on some facts about the Pentagon to see what they had learned.  In return for completing the scavenger hunt and passing "the quiz," I gave them each a "prize" (one of the things I had picked up in the Pentagon gift shop earlier that week).  From there, we headed back to the 2nd corridor entrance to go back out to South Parking.

In order to help plan my route and to be able to find specific exhibits quickly, I made my own map of the exhibits in each hallway.  I have NOT finished mapping it all yet, but I have all the A-ring hallways mapped plus a few of the interesting corridors and the Army Living History exhibit.

Click on image to enlarge.

Blunoz's Weekend Pentagon Tour Route
Given those constraints, I came up with my own tour path that went like this:
- Parked in South Parking, visited the Pentagon Memorial
- Enter 2nd Corridor Entrance (use restrooms there if necessary depending on how long your drive to the Pentagon was or how long you were at the Pentagon Memorial).
- Take elevator or stairs up to 3rd floor (remember - escalators are turned off on weekends)
- Pentagon Building History exhibit (3rd floor, 2nd corridor).  I put together some notes to talk about the history of how the Pentagon got its shape and comparing its size to other things.  I am happy to email you the powerpoint slides I made, just send me an email.
- At A-ring, turn right into NORAD hallway and go up escalator (walking up them like stairs) to 4th floor.
- USAF Aces exhibit (4th floor, A-ring between 1st and 10th corridor)
- USAF History and models (4th floor, A-ring between 9th and 8th corridor)
- U.S. Coast Guard history (4th floor, A-ring first half of hallway between 7th and 6th corridor)
- Naval Aviation history (4th floor, A-ring second half of hallway between 7th and 6th corridor)
- Down the stairs to 3rd floor.  Here at the 5-6 Apex you can take a side excursion down the POW/MIA hallway (3rd floor, A-ring from 6th to 7th corridor) and then back again, or continue onward.
- MacArthur exhibit (3rd floor, A-ring between 5th and 4th corridor)
- Down the stairs to the 2nd floor.
- Soldier Signers of the Declaration of Independence (2nd floor, 4th corridor)
- Out at the E-Ring, take the stairs or elevator down to the 1st floor.
- 9-11 Memorial Chapel (end of 4th corridor on 1st floor)
- 9-11 Memorial Quilts (1st floor, 4th corridor) back to the A-ring then left into
- Eisenhower Exhibit (1st floor, A-ring from 4th to 5th corridor).
- Women in the Military exhibit (1st floor, A-ring from 6th to 7th corridor)
- Up the stairs to the 2nd floor.
- Go out the 7th corridor to the E-ring.
- Army Living History Exhibit (2nd floor, E-ring from 7th to 6th corridor)
- Continue along the E-ring past the 6th corridor to see something pretty cool.  You can't miss it.
- Turn around, go back to the 6th corridor and out to the A-ring 
- Disaster Relief Exhibit (2nd floor, A-ring from 6th to 7th corridor)
- ANZUS exhibit (2nd floor, A-ring from 8th to 9th corridor)
- Out the 10th corridor and make a U-turn to the left by the Hall of Heroes in order to see the D-Day Paintings in the ramp going up to the 3rd floor.  

So you COULD take the route recommended in the Pentagon Self-Guided Tour brochure, and it would be shorter.  You COULD take the route I developed and listed above that'll go to more of the exhibits.  Or, you COULD make up your own route using my map up above.

EMP Museum

It's only taken two years of living in the Pacific Northwest, but I finally went to the top of the Seattle Space Needle.  I'm glad I did it, just to be able to say I've been there, done that.  Cross it off the list and not live a life wondering what I was missing.

In hindsight though, holy cow that was some highway robbery!  The cost of the tickets to go up the Space Needle and check out the view were astronomically high.  You'd think we were actually funding putting the Space Needle into orbit!  My wife's cousin has lived here in Seattle for over a decade and has NOT been to the top of the Space Needle.  She's now gone so long without it that she considers it a matter of pride and refuses to go when invited.  To her I say, WELL DONE!  She is much wiser than me.

After the Space Needle, we went to the nearby EMP Museum.

Oh.

My.

I didn't really know what to expect.  My wife said she heard it was cool and it had musical instruments and stuff.  I said okay, sure, why not?  I'm always up for some new experiences.

I'm SO glad we went.  The EMP Museum is TOTALLY worth the price of admission.  If we weren't getting ready to pack our household goods for yet another cross-country PCS move, then I would have bought the annual pass so we could go back. 

If you have ANY interest in ANYTHING sci-fi related from Star Wars to Star Trek to Dr. Who to The Fifth Element to Men in Black to Aliens to Terminator to War of the Worlds to the Matrix...  You should go to the EMP Museum.  I LOVED the Icons of Science Fiction exhibit.  It's a museum of costumes and props from just about every sci-fi movie and television show you can imagine.

The Art of Video Games exhibit was like going back 30+ years through a time warp and conducting a pass-in-review of the various electronic boxes that have consumed hours upon days upon weeks of my evening and weekend free-time away from school and eventually work.  Starting with the Commodore 64 and working your way up through the first Nintendo to the Wii, XBox 360, and Sega, there is an exhibit for each computer or gaming console and a sample of four types of games to show you the quality of graphics and sound.  Man some of those old games brought back memories!

Up on the third floor they have some pretty cool music stuff.  There's a Sound Lab full of different musical instruments for you to try, with an interactive touch-screen computer display for each instrument.  I was pretty impressed my eldest son picked up the bass guitar, figured out the bars works the same way as on his cello, and started plucking out the notes of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on the guitar.

Then there's this exhibit called On Stage where you can go do a simulated live performance in front of a huge crowd.  You make up a band name and choose from a short list of cover songs to sing.  My family chose the Go-Go's "We Got the Beat."  If you really do know how to play the instrument, then they can turn it on so you'll really play it, but otherwise, you just pretend you're banging away on the keyboard or guitar and sing along.  They play background noise like there's a screaming crowd of fans in the audience in front of you.  We had fun pretending to be rock stars on the stage.  Of course, after you walk off the stage, then they would like to stick a vacuum in your wallet and get you to buy DVDs of your stage performance and posters of your band on stage, etc, but that's all optional.  We skipped the souvenirs, but we had fun playing on the stage.

There are several more exhibits there to see, and you can check them all out on the EMP Museum website, but those were my top three favorites from our visit.  The website is well-done and has a lot better pictures than what I took with the camera in my phone.

The gift shop was pretty dangerous for us, too.  My boys are obsessed with Dr. Who, and there was a TON of Dr. Who stuff in the gift shop.  They've both been wearing their new Dr. Who t-shirts as often as my wife gets them through the laundry.  That resulted in my youngest son wearing his Dr. Who shirt to school two days in a row.  Plus they had a lot of funny Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Princess Bridge paraphernalia like glasses labeled "IOCANE POWDER" and t-shirts with "HELLO:  My Name Is... Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die."

My advice, skip the Space Needle and just go have fun at the EMP Museum!

Weekend Getaway - Astoria, Oregon

For Labor Day weekend, we looked a little bit farther out of our normal range of outside activities to find a place to spend the weekend.  My wife and I both loved the movie Goonies when we were kids, and we decided to go down and check out Astoria, Oregon.

Before we went there, I kept calling it "Uh-story-uh."  After spending the weekend there, I have learned everyone down there calls it "Ass-story-uh."  It's a pretty little seaside town right at the mouth of the Columbia River.  It's only about 3 1/2 hours drive from Bremerton, so it makes for a nice not-too-far weekend getaway.

View from Holiday Inn Express

We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express right under the Astoria bridge.  It was a pretty nice place - and the prices reflected it, but we got some sort of weekend getaway discount deal.  They serve a pretty decent continental breakfast in the lobby, too.


It turns out there are several movies that have been filmed in Astoria, not just Goonies.  Some of the others we recognized were Kindergarten Cop and Short Circuit.  If you stop at the Chamber of Commerce, for $1 you can have a paper map and an audio CD that takes you through a tour of the town and past all the movie locations.  We went by the Goonies' house, the winding road where Mikey's older brother chased them on the little girl's bike, the window where Chunk smashes his milkshake while watching the police chase, the museum where Mikey's father worked and was taking down the flag at the beginning of the movie, and the jail.

They have turned the jailhouse into a film museum and will let kids film their own movie inside.  Out in front of the jail they have the black Jeep Cherokee the Fratelli family used in the movie, complete with bullet holes in the back, and the cast of the movie all autographed the dashboard with a black permanent marker.

Driving that winding road that Mikey's brother rode the little girl's bike on takes you up to the top of the hill overlooking Astoria and the Astoria Column.  The view here is truly spectacular and made it worth the drive down from Bremerton.  Heck, even if you didn't want to pay for a hotel to stay overnight, you could make this a day trip - drive down, go to the top of the tower, see the Goonies locations, and drive back in one day.  This picture is looking south from the top of the Column toward the Lewis & Clark River.  The picture at the top of this post is the view toward the Columbia River and the bridge from the top of the column.

They sell balsa wood gliders in the gift shop at the bottom of the column.  They will hand you a Sharpie marker to write your name on the glider before you throw it off the top of the column.  Granted, first you have to climb the 100+ spiral staircase steps to the top, but it was totally worth it. 

The boys conducting pre-flight checks on their gliders.  We had a blast watching our gliders soaring off into the distance.

We had lunch at this boat-turned-fish'n'chips-grill called the Bowpicker.  DANG it was good stuff.  They make fish'n'chips using fresh tuna, and it was absolutely extraordinary!  Small boats aside, there were a plethora of awesome local restaurants in Astoria serving excellent dishes using fresh local produce.  There are a couple of breweries, too, but I wasn't overly thrilled with their beer.  We went to two breweries and they both served the typical Pacific Northwest style of IPA with heavy hops.  I'm much more a fan of New England style lagers.  Oh, but the Crater Lake root beer they had on tap at the Wet Dog Cafe was delicious!

There's a maritime museum on the waterfront in Astoria - the Columbia River Maritime Museum.  I've been to a lot of small-town museums before, and 99% of them have been boring and lame - some collection of random odds and ends and local history with the name "museum" slapped on the building to try and create a tourist attraction.  Not so in this case.

This museum was actually very well done with high quality exhibits about the Graveyard of the Pacific, the local US Coast Guard rescue boats, the Columbia River pilots, the salmon fishing industry, and a wing of Navy stuff from the battleship USS OREGON and the two WWII cruisers to carry the name USS ASTORIA.  The boys loved playing in the tug boat pilot house.

We also visited Fort Clatsop National Historic Park.  After Lewis & Clark reached the Pacific coast, this is where they spent the winter before heading back east.  This is a replica of the fort that was built using the drawings from Lewis & Clark's journals.

We got there just in time for a hike led by a Park Ranger, and I continue to enjoy every chance I can get to learn from them.  Park Rangers always lead awesome tours and have so much fascinating history to teach and explain.

The boys with Sacagawea.  

One of the stories I learned from the Park Ranger was how Lewis & Clark referred to her simply as "the squaw" until one day a canoe full of their precious journals and scientific instruments capsized, and she dove in and saved the stuff.  It wasn't until she saved their gear that they bothered to learn her name and refer to her by her name in their journals.

There's a nice trolley that goes back and forth along the waterfront in Astoria, too.  It only costs a dollar to ride, and we totally got our money's worth.  I would go back and ride the trolley again more for the things I learned from the conductors than for the transportation they provided.

The conductors were full of historic trivia and stories about the area.  Other people on the trolley commented on how each of the conductors had different stories to tell and they learned something new and different each time they rode.

Overall it was a wonderful trip.  If you're looking for a weekend getaway from Bremerton, or even just a day-trip, I highly recommend checking out the view from the Astoria Column, taking a ride on the trolley, visiting the maritime museum, and doing the Chamber of Commerce's driving tour of the movie sights.

DC Gouge: New Submarine Exhibit Opening at Navy Museum

If you're in DC and you've never been to the Navy Museum at the Washington Navy Yard, then I highly recommend checking it out.

My youngest son on the periscope in the Navy Museum

Soon there will be even more cool stuff to see at the museum.  I just received this from the DC Naval Submarine League:

The submarine exhibit “Covert Submarine Operations” will be dedicated by the Naval Historical Foundation on Saturday, 18 June at the Washington Navy Yard Museum.  The event is open to all connected with the Submarine Force and Naval Submarine League.  The attached invitation (email me if you want a copy of the invite) provides the details and a map of the WNY with directions to the Cold War Gallery museum.  Spouse/friends are included in the invitation.

(Event is past - so I removed the RSVP data)

The exhibit contains most of the artifacts from the Smithsonian’s “Fast Attack and Boomers” exhibit that was opened in 2000 as part of the Submarine Force Centennial celebration and is the first major exhibit in the Museum’s new Cold War Gallery.

If I were still in DC, then I know where I would be going next Saturday! 

National Museum of the Marine Corps

We've heard multiple friends rave about the National Museum of the Marine Corps, and it's been on my to-do list for a while.  Last weekend, my friend Bob and I took the boys down to Quantico to visit the museum.  We went with pretty high expectations, and we weren't disappointed.

The exterior invokes the image of the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima.

My youngest son under the F-4 Corsair

The museum is very well organized to take you through a chronological series of exhibits on everything from the Revolution through the War of 1812, the Mexian War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Cold War.

There was a LOT to see.  The exhibits were very high-tech, interactive multi-media type displays.

Then there was some goofy fun, too.

My youngest son (6 years old) brought his stuffed-animal dog, Waggy, and we have dozens of photos of Waggy from all over the museum.  My eldest son (9 years old) really liked the World War I exhibit since he's been doing a segment on World War I at school.

Amphibious landing craft used in the landings at Tarawa.

Bob and I especially enjoyed the World War II exhibit since we just finished watching The Pacific.  It was great to see some pictures of the real Marines who were portrayed in the HBO series, and videos of interviews with them, too. 

The first US flag flown over Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima.

In the Korean War section, we walked through a life-size diorama of the Chosin Reservoir with gunfire and mortars going off, tracers flying by, and they have the temperature in that room cranked down so you feel like you're freezing your butt off at the Chosin Reservoir.
 

The boys running down the ramp of the CH-46 into Vietnam.

You enter the Vietnam section through the fuselage of a CH-46 helicopter.  The inside of the helicopter really SMELLS like a military helicopter.  While in the helicopter, you listen to some radio dialogue between the pilot and the ground forces about landing in a hot LZ.  Then you run down the ramp into the diorama of Vietnam, and it's HOT and HUMID and there's a battle raging around you.

Harrier and helo

I was impressed to see so many Medals of Honor on display here.  Since it's illegal to reproduce or sell a Medal of Honor, you know the ones on display here in the museum are the real thing donated by the families of the brave Marines who earned them.

We arrived about 1 p.m., and they kicked us out at closing time at 5 p.m.  We had to drag the boys out against their will.  They were busy doing some interactive team problem-solving game when I had to drag them out because the museum was closing.  

Two peas in a pod.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps is essentially a museum of American History.  In every conflict our nation has ever fought, the Marines have been there and done that.  This was an extraordinarily good museum and a fun time for all of us.  

To top it all off, it's FREE!  And when I say free, I'm not saying Smithsonian it's-free-but-you've-gotta-pay-$14-to-park "free" (like the Udvar Hazy Center).  This is really no kidding FREE. 

Don't forget to check out the Lego Sculpture in the Gift Shop!

Christmas in Oregon

We had a really nice Christmas in Oregon. All the family was over on Christmas Eve to open most of the presents, then Christmas morning we opened the stuff from Santa. After breakfast and the first round of playing with new toys, my dad, eldest son, and I went for a walk in Mary S. Young Park and found another couple of geocaches.


I know anybody in Oregon reading this will probably say, "You took pictures of that???" However, I enjoyed seeing things in Oregon that I don't normally see in Virginia. For example...

Moss

A fallen tree had recently been cut into sections,
revealing these beautiful rings.

Ferns

So many ferns you can hardly tell
there's a tree trunk underneath.

Fungus

Isn't it interesting how the fungus has only grown around the edges of this fallen tree?

Moss and Fungus

On Boxing Day, we went up to Portland to visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). One of the big attractions at OMSI is the ex-USS BLUEBACK (SS-581).

Self-portrait with the boys in front of BLUEBACK.

Bearing, MARK!

I won't bore you here with a lot of pictures of the science museum. Suffice to say they have a lot of the usual hands-on science-experiment type fun activities to do with kids. On temporary loan to OMSI, they had Samson, one of the most complete T-Rex skeletons.

Self-portrait with Sampson.

He'll GNASH you apaht
with BIG POINTY TEETH!

There's nothing like a HUGE radiation-trifoil symbol to feed public fear of nuclear power.

Later, my brother and his partner took us all to see Beauty and the Beast in downtown Portland. It was an excellent performance. This was the first exposure the boys have had to a professional stage production like that, and my eldest son was fascinated by how the sets changed.

Playbill

The foyer inside the theater was spectacular.

With that, I bring to a close my blogging on our vacation in Oregon. We had a wonderful vacation and are very thankful for such a loving extended family and for the opportunity to spend time together this holiday season.

We left Portland just in time. As we were sitting on the plane before backing away from the terminal, it started to snow.

We made it home to the DC area just in time, too. Most of the roads are clear from the big snow storm last weekend. This morning I woke up to the sound of our neighbors shoveling fresh snow and ice out of their driveway. Time to get my boots on and get to shoveling.

Have a Happy New Year!

International Spy Museum

It seems a little odd to me that my boys don't have Veteran's Day off of school. They had the Monday and Tuesday off last week though, so I took a day of leave on Tuesday to spend the day with the boys.

We took a trip into downtown DC to visit the International Spy Museum. We've been wanting to go for a while, and this just ended up being a great day for us to go. From talking to other people, it sounds like going on a weekday was ideal. I hear the lines get really long on the weekends, but there was no line for us on Tuesday morning.

In researching the museum on their website, I was excited about all the cool stuff they had listed to see and do. I was thinking we would spend like 2 hours in the museum, eat some lunch, then go to the Spy-in-the-City mission where they give you a GPS with a set of headphones and you embark on a practice mission along a 1.2 mile walking circuit through the city.

My plans didn't work out so well though.

I had no idea how big the museum itself is, or how much time we would want to spend there. There are two floors to the museum. Right after you pay for your tickets, they put you in an elevator to the second floor. When you come out of the elevator, you are in a room with several displays of fake identities of various combinations of age and gender. You each pick out a fake identity and try to memorize as much of your cover story as possible before you embark through the rest of the museum. Periodically as you go through the museum, there are interactive touch-screen displays where you have to apply some knowledge from the tradecraft you just learned about in the museum along with knowledge of your cover story from the very beginning.

As in any museum, there were plenty of static displays, but there were also a lot of hands-on, interactive things to do. For example, there was one section about disguises, and in the interactive computer touch-screen display there, you were supposed to spot the spy in a crowded room. They gave you an identification photo of the bad guy you were trying to catch, but then the bad guy would be wearing a disguise and it was a challenge to figure out which person it was.

My favorite section of the museum was the cryptography stuff. They had some really cool exhibits that explained basic ciphers and the history of cryptography. They had some virtual Enigma machines to practice encoding a German message and then using some code-breaking techniques with a stolen Enigma figure out how to break the message into plain text. Very cool stuff!

Unfortunately, they don't allow photography in the museum and there were museum employees everywhere, so the only picture you get from this field trip is the photo of the boys out in front of the museum.


After the boys and I spent 2 hours just on the second floor, we came down the stairs and saw there was another whole floor for us to explore and learn. So we went out and put more money in our parking meter (actually, we bought another slip from the pay-and-display machine), ate some lunch in the Spy City Cafe, and then went back in to see the exhibits on the first floor for another hour. By the time we got out of there, it was time to head home for the boys swimming lessons, so we didn't get to do the Spy-in-the-City mission. I'd like to go back and do that someday though.

Food-wise: The Spy City Cafe is adjacent to the museum lobby and gift shop. The service was courteous and professional, and the food was actually pretty good. The boys each had a hot dog, I had a turkey reuben, and we shared some french fries and gourmet cupcakes. I suffered a mild-case of sticker-shock when the total amount appeared on the cash register though. In fact, the whole day's outing cost me a bit more than I had anticipated.

Wallet-Hemorrhaging Report:
- $45 on one adult and two child tickets (with the military discount - $17 adult and $14 kids)
- $31 on lunch - the food was good, but they really nickel and dime you. I mean, $3 for a fountain soda??? Common! They give you like an 8 oz. cup for the soda, so you'd have to go back and refill it like 6 times to get your money's worth at $3 per cup. When I saw the size of the cups, I mistakenly ordered 3 drinks, not realizing how much they were charging.
- $8 on parking

Total not including gas: $84 for the three of us to tour the museum and have lunch. Luckily we escaped the gift shop without any souvenirs, and luckily we ran out of time and didn't need to pay for Spy-in-the-City, too.

In spite of the sticker shock, we really enjoyed the International Spy Museum. It was a day of leave very well spent. I'm glad we went, and I hope to go back to do the mission someday.