Mega Day

 Yesterday was crazy!

We started off with a shopping excursion, followed by a trip to the College Park Airport Museum.  I am always amazed at how much we love this museum!

We started off in the "yard" where the smaller Zoomlians played in the toy planes.

 Then it was on to the inside where they played in a real plane!

One of the things I like best about this museum is the dress up:

 Here we have Zorg and Mxyl in a plane.
On the other side we have Oob, very pleased with having dressed himself.  
We spent a little less time at the museum than we had planned because 5 camp groups arrived at once. It may be my imagination, but it seems, in the last 5 years, there are more and more school/camp groups and fewer and fewer families at museums. Is it because no one is home for the summer? 

An unfortunate side effect is the increase in shrieking.  A mom has a much better chance at getting her 7 yo girl  to stop screaming at the monkey/airplane/widget than anyone has with a group of seven shrieking 7yo girls.

After the museum we had a picnic at a nearby park and played on the playground there.  Then it was off to Old Greenbelt!  We live near Greenbelt, the first federally planned town, built in the Great Depression.

It's a fascinating Art Deco slice of 1930's liberal idealism. It was built for 3 reasons:

1. To provide jobs during it's construction.  For this reason it was built in the most labor intensive way possible.  For example, many of the buildings were made with cement interior walls, an experiment which has since gone by the wayside.  It has good points (No need to build a bomb shelter, you already live in one!)  and bad points (What? You need to access the plumbing or wiring?).

2. To provide good housing for low and middle income workers.  To this day, it's a great place to live, although my impression is that it skews a bit more towards middle class.

3. As an experiment in city planning.  It was designed so that everyone could walk anywhere in town.  There is an elaborate network of walkways and pedestrian tunnels that move people efficiently through the town. The town itself is situated around Roosevelt Plaza, where you can eat at the New Deal Cafe, or see a film in a gorgeous Art Deco movie house. 


Sculptures abound, mostly looking like this.

To be fair, the picture above this one is also this sculptors work, and it illustrates the preamble of the Constitution.  I like it much better, but all the sculpture in the town is a similar, blocky '30s style.  Fun to visit, but not what I'd want in my house!


Our tour wound up at the library (where I had to return some books) and by then the Zoomlians were a bit tired.  This is the stone bench in front of the library.

We finished up at the Greenbelt Pool with a refreshing dip, and then headed home to crash!