Museums for Dads

Last week with Thursday off I took my two youngest children to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Musuem. It is a huge hanger at Dulles Airport stuffed full of retired airplanes and a few rockets. Its signature collection pieces are Space Shuttle Discovery, an SR-71 Mach 3 reconnaissance jet, and an Air France Concorde. It had been several years since I had last visited, and there were more people than any time I had been there previously. One enjoyment in that was the several times I was close enough to overhear fathers explaining exhibits to their families.

—An aircraft I had not noticed before was the Aerodrome that Langley was trying to get airborne at the time the Wrights succeeded. When I saw that suspended cloth-draped stick skeleton, I thought it was someone’s fanciful project to bring a Leonardo da Vinci sketch into 3-D full-scale reality.

—The Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum in Ohio is a vast collection. I visited once in 2003 (the day the Space Shuttle Columbia failed on re-entry). The last few years I keep wanting to return.