The wife and I are in Washington D.C. this (long) weekend, cramming as much activity into two days as possible. We really only have two full days (Friday and Saturday) due to the 16 hour total round trip drive time from Boston. It’s not really a bad drive, mostly because I didn’t drive and just watched movies the whole time. (Side note – Dear Kate Winslet, you reached your topless scene high point in Titanic… Your effort in “The Reader” was like me trying to make cartwheeling my one and only mode of transportation: way too much of something I can’t pull off and ends up looking weird and scaring people. Please stop. Please.)
You may or may not know, depending on how cultured you are, but most museums and tourist attractions around D.C. are free, like all of the Smithsonians, the Capital, White (Black) House tours, etc. Well, with all of that free-ness and such a limited amount of time we’re on a strict time budget. We want to see as much as we can, but can’t be giving our precious time to piece-of-crap informational displays like the Native American Museum.
The result? Get in and get out as quick as you can, because otherwise you’re just wasting a freebie, and that’s wasteful.
The official rules: When you come across a free museum that gets in the way of the next thing you were really trying to see in the first time, implement the “see it and flee it” plan. Essentially, the goal is to at least glance at every single thing in the entire museum – each exhibit, each display — in the shortest amount of time possible. Time starts when you begin your explore and ends when both people clear the doors of the building back to the outside, much more interesting world.
Yeah, you might get some odd looks, trip a kid, get followed by a security guard, or even get a lecture on how you’re not “appreciating the art” (Guess which of those things didn’t really happen. If you said “none of the above”, you’re correct), but it’s clearly the most efficient use of time possible. And who else can say they saw two national museums in less than 30 combined minutes?
Besides, nobody said museums had speed limits. In the end, I still saw all the crap all those other people saw, just in less detail. Every once in a while, I even recognized something I saw, too.
If you’re wondering if “Speed Tourism” is for you, just see for yourself. Here’s a portion of Shane and Cassandra’s trip through the National Art Gallery earlier today. Good times. The official scoreboard, to be updated again tomorrow, follows:
OFFICIAL TIME SCOREBOARD
National Museum of the American Indian – 12 Minutes 21 Seconds
National Gallery of Art – `16 Minutes 10 Seconds