DC Day: National Building Museum/The Big Maze

For our next DC Day we went to the National Building Museum because I wanted to see the giant maze exhibit.

It was so fun. If I had wanted to stay all day, we could have. We went through it three times. The maze is actually designed so that once you get to the center, the walls get lower so you become better oriented. Whereas most mazes, with uniform wall heights, get more confusing toward the middle. 

After the first two times--the first time took us about 7-8 minutes and the second time took us more like 15-20--I suggested we go upstairs and look at the maze from up there so that we could study the correct route.

View from the third floor:

If you study it, you can see that we discovered that we needed to stay towards the right. So on our third time through we went through in record time--3 minutes. We were pretty pleased with ourselves.

We have been to the NBM several times but only for the Building Zone (kids' play area), which costs about $3 or $4. In order to go in the maze, though, we had to buy general admission tickets PLUS maze tickets. So that was $16 for me and $13 each for the kids. Due to my one-hour policy, I was none too jazzed about paying the big bucks for a museum. But I sucked it up and I'm glad I did because it was great. It included the Building Zone so we did that first. Then the maze and one other exhibit. We stayed about 90 minutes total.

While we were upstairs, we checked out the exhibit House and Home, which was cool. I didn't take pictures because they weren't allowed, but the kids liked a big video installation that showed families living in unusual homes.

And what post is complete without a photo of a public bathroom? I just really liked this calm, clean, light-filled bathroom. It reminded me of school for some reason. I know I'm a weirdo but I'm ok with it.

We also saw a pay phone, which I took a picture of and accidentally deleted later. Because a pay phone. Who sees those?

It was an amazingly beautiful day outside.

Usually there's parking right in front of the NBM on F street, but there was some kind of camp going on so all the metered spots were reserved. We had to drive around for 10 minutes before finally finding a spot on H. Sometimes people tell me they don't like to go to DC because they don't like dealing with parking. But it's really not that bad once you get used to it. And it's never bad if you arrive right at 9:30 when a lot of parking opens up. (Which we always aim to do, but it doesn't always happen.)