We took our campers to the Arboretum...they always have so much fun there. We looked at the koi fish and then we headed up to the capitol pillars where there is a fountain, a waterfall/river thing that leads to an infinity/reflection pool. The children had so much fun playing in the water! We headed back towards the main part of the Arboretum and looked at some of the bonsai trees in the Chinese garden part.
The clouds started rolling in and getting darker so we headed back to the bus stop and got to camp before the rain started. All the walking and playing made the children tired so we had quite a few resters that afternoon.
After work I headed to Fairfax. Joe brought me to the NRA to see the Museum in his building. So impressive! Lots of unique guns of all kinds...some famous and some just plain interesting. I had 10 minutes to tour the entire museum before it closed so Joe gave me the super quick tour...I was trying to listen while I was trying to take pictures. I'll do my best to remember what he said.
The first gallery you enter is the The Robert E. Peterson gallery. Mr. Peterson left the museum his entire collection of firearms and they replicated his personal library as the gallery for the museum so it is like you are actually in his home looking at his collection. This guy had guns that had been owned by JFK, Annie Oakley and some other famous people that I can't remember that Joe told me. There had to be over a 200 guns in just his collection though!
They also had on display the history of firearms and the history of guns that were failures as well as those that are still popular and available today. One of the neatest guns there was a handgun that was carried by an NYPD officer on 9/11. It was recovered and the officer's family donated it to the NRA...at least I think that is how they got it...remember I was busy taking pictures while he was talking and breezing his way through the museum.
One of the other sections that I remember looking at was the exhibit on guns in Hollywood. They had a vast array of guns used in movies and TV from John Wayne and Magnum P.I.
The museum was closing but before we left he took me up a couple floors to a hallway that has a bunch of deer mounts with some of the most impressive racks. One of them is from Wright County, MN! All the racks are replicas of just the antlers and can be removed because they are on a rotation...the deer heads stay there, they just switch the antlers out and change the information card. They looked real enough to me!
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