It’s been almost two weeks since we got back from Washington, DC, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of all the incredible things we saw there. I already talked a little about the monuments, but in all honesty that only took up a day and a half of the weeklong trip. There was so much more – museums, the zoo, Mount Vernon, the local food, the neighborhoods – that if I wrote about everything at about one post per week, I could have material for the rest of the year. But among the other things I want from this blog, I do want it to be somewhat timely. So I have limited myself to one more article from the DC trip and then I will move on to other topics.
With that framework in mind, what should I choose to explore in more detail? The monuments really capture the essence of DC, but they epitomize the city for everyone, not just me. They are a requisite tourist stop, and although they have the potential to affect each individual visitor in a unique way, just about anyone who visits Washington could write about them. My second topic for the DC trip needs to be something as epic as the monuments, but something that profoundly impacted me as a person. And clearly, the only subject that meets these criteria is dinosaurs.
That may have caught you, dear reader, a little off guard. Dinosaurs are hardly the first image one has when thinking of Washington, DC, and I’m fairly sure there aren’t even any pictures of them in the visitor guides I ordered when I was planning this vacation. But between my experiences at the National Zoo and the National Museum of Natural History, prehistoric creatures did significantly add to the awe and wonder of this trip.
Although the museum has quite the dinosaur collection, the much more significant dinosaur encounter in Washington happened at the National Zoo. The zoo only seems to garner average reviews in online trip planning websites, but my wife and I are big zoo fans, so we thought we should give it a try. I grew up being an on-again off-again member of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and loved every trip we made out there. And although Des Moines has a rather small zoo, we are members glad to support it and its mission. Besides all that, the National Zoo has Giant Pandas, one of the rarest land animals in the world. For the pandas alone we decided to ignore the online advice, and blocked out an entire day for it.
It’s a good thing we did, because the National Zoo is really big and has a lot of animals. Unfortunately it is also the worst laid-out zoo I can imagine, but the great creatures we saw overshadowed that. We got there early to avoid the crowds, and headed over to the pandas. The one we saw was as adorable as they are in pictures, but she seemed content to spend her morning sitting in a shady spot munching on bamboo. Once we had watched her for a while, we quickly headed toward Beaver Valley where we intended to watch the otter feeding time. As we rounded a corner past the lemurs, I found myself face-to-face with a life-size Triceratops statue.
My first thought was to hurry past, because strangely enough, Brookfield Zoo has an unexplained Hadrosaur statue and for some reason I thought this was the same type of display. But I saw that there was a small placard in front of the statue, a few gears clicked in my head, and I suddenly froze. My wife had walked on a little ways, not knowing I had stopped, and now came back to see why I was gawking at the dinosaur statue when there were real animals just a little further on. With goosebumps breaking out on my arms, I slowly stepped forward until I could read the sign, and confirmed that I was staring at Uncle Beazley.
The reason for my reaction, as I hurriedly explained to my bemused wife, is that Uncle Beazley is the dinosaur protagonist from The Enormous Egg, one of my favorite books growing up. It is a heartwarming story about a Connecticut farm boy whose hen lays a, well, enormous egg, which ends up hatching into a dinosaur. I’d rather that anyone reading this blog actually reads the book, so I won’t elaborate any more on the story, but suffice it to say that it makes perfect sense to see Uncle Beazley at the National Zoo.
I don’t know how many times I read The Enormous Egg when I was younger, but I do know that I absolutely loved it. I can still picture the copy we owned, and more importantly, I can see in vivid detail the scenes that occurred within its pages, just as I imagined them all those years ago. This was the first book that I remember painting images into my head with such clarity that I could actually see them. And although the 1979 encyclopedia set we owned gets a lot of the credit in conversation, I think The Enormous Egg really began my love affair with the written word, as a consumer and now starting to become a producer.
Just think of what an experience this was. A defining moment during my formative years, a fond memory I have from my youth, staring me in the face some 20 years later. And he looked exactly like he should have, both from the beautiful illustrations in the book, and from my own imagination. Can you conceive what it would be like to bump into the Lorax, one of the Wild Things, Falcor the Luck Dragon, whoever it might be for you? That was what I experienced, right in the middle of the National Zoo. And though I said before that it made sense for him to be there, I never would have guessed that I would ever actually see Uncle Beazley in person. I respectfully took a few pictures and headed off a few minutes later to see the rest of the animals.
The rest of the zoo was really great, definitely warranting a trip for those heading to DC, despite the average online reviews. The animals were fantastic and there are a lot of neat exhibits. Similarly, the hall of dinosaurs at the National Museum of Natural History is impressive to look at, inspiring awe and wonder at the magnitude of the bones on display. But I have to say that of all that I saw at the zoo, and of all the dinosaurs I saw at the museum, the greatest one had to be the unmoving concrete one at the National Zoo. So if you take a trip to Washington DC, definitely check out the museums and be sure to visit the zoo. And while you’re there, say hi to Uncle Beazley for me.
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