National Air & Space Museum

The most popular Smithsonian museum is one of the best for kids and kids at heart, full of interactivity and things that go fast/boom/swoosh/etc. When you visit, don’t forget to touch the moon. No, really, there’s an actual chunk of lunar love here, its well-worn surface pressed by millions of curious fingers over the years. Other must-sees include Chuck Yeager’s sound-barrier-breaking Bell X-1, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, the Lunar Lander and the Wright Brothers’ original airplane. They all hang from wires off the enormous ceiling, directing your gaze ever upwards to the eternal vault of the endless sk – ow – watch it kid!

That’s the drawback of this spot: eight million visitors traipse through the Air & Space museum annually, and they all seem to visit at the same time. But you gotta come anyways. C’mon – they’ve got real nuclear missiles! Plus astronaut ice cream (the stuff they actually eat in space; it tastes awful) in the gift shop and the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, which offers a rotating list of films shown throughout the day. Alternative shows at the Albert Einstein Planetarium send viewers hurtling through space on tours of the universe. Buy your tickets as soon as you arrive, or on the museum website before you visit.

The Air & Space is so awesome they made an attic for it: the Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center (www.nasm.si.edu/museum/udvarhazy; 14390 Air and Space Museum Parkway, Chantilly, VA). Highlights include the SR-71 Blackbird (the fastest jet in the world), space shuttle Enterprise and the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima). Visitors can hang out in the observation tower and watch the planes take off and land at Dulles airport, or catch shows at the on-site Airbus IMAX Theater.

To get out here, you’ll need to either drive (take I-66 West to VA 267 West, then VA 28 South, then follow the signs) or take Metro bus 5A to Dulles. From there, it’s an $8 to $12 taxi ride, or you can take a 50¢ Virginia Regional Transit (www.vatransit.org) bus to the museum.

Together these two sites comprise the world’s largest collection of aviation and space artifacts, and folks, that’s pretty damn cool.