If you have ever traveled on the Metro (Washington, DC’s subway), you’ve heard “Step Back…Doors Closing” cheerily announced as the train prepares to leave each station. And when you’ve taken the Metro as often as we have these past few weeks, you hear it even before it’s announced. It reminds me of the London Tubes’s repetitive warning to “Mind the Gap”.

All that is to say that we have been on the Metro’s Red Line a lot during our “southern” vacation in Maryland--so often that our decision to spend $2 each to get a senior discount (which cuts the fare in half) has really paid off.

We went to the National Gallery by Metro. We went to the Phillips Gallery by Metro. We went to the Supreme Court and Library of Congress by Metro. And on Wednesday we went to the Hirshhorn Museum by Metro.

The temperature was in the 50’s with a cloudless sky, so welcome after several days of rain. On the way to the Hirshhorn, we crossed the National Mall and stopped to eat our lunch in the National Gallery’s sculpture garden where we enjoyed the art and watched ice-skaters—an odd, but happy sight in the warm weather.

Our guidebook had encouraged us to see the Hirshhorn’s outdoor sculpture exhibit that many visitors miss because it is down some steps before the museum entrance. There were great works by sculptors we know and great works by sculptors we don’t. Our worry that we’d be disappointed in the museum itself, was unfounded. Wonderful art, most of it collected by the Museum’s founding donor, plus a sweeping view of the Mall from the third floor balcony. For lovers of sculpture, it is extraordinary. For art and, currently, for its live orchid display, it’s worth a trip to Washington.

And as a bonus, the crowds from the Inauguration and the Women’s March had left and the spring tourists hadn’t arrived.

#Love DC, #Love being with our grandchildren, #Love 50-degree weather in January