A Day of Luck

The beginning of a day of luck

Since I have moved to D.C, I have been trying to visit a different Smithsonian museum each weekend. A few weeks ago, I went to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture with my friend Kendall. It’s the newest museum on the national mall and one of the hardest to get tickets for. When I arrived, I noticed people were lining up to get tickets scanned. The previous weeks, I had visited the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Asian Art and the Museum of African Art and none of those had timed entries, so the idea of the NMAAHC having one never crossed my mind. I talked to the worker out front who was scanning tickets and he told me that the passes are released at 8:00am for time slots 30 days out and at 8:15 for same-day, dejected, my mind was already planning a museum alternative, until he mentioned almost as an after-thought, that military are allowed in whenever and they can bring a friend. As luck would have it, Kendall was in the military, and I was one friend. Once he arrived, we were able to go in without a problem. The beginning of a day of luck.

A day of luck continues…

One thing that wasn’t on my radar until someone had mentioned it was going to the top of the Washington monument. It wasn’t something that I thought you could do, let alone do it for free. I did, however remember in one of Tom Holland’s spider man’s, they go up there, but I didn’t think you actually could. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is right next to the Washington monument, so after our visit we walked over because I wanted to talk to someone to figure out how to go about getting tickets. I couldn’t find concrete information online. It looked like everything was booked out for the month, so I thought I could get things clarified for me. Out front of the monument was a park ranger, so we went over to him and asked about the ticketing process. He told us that the tickets become available for the next day at 10am and while that conversation was happening a guy came up to us and asked us if we wanted two tickets for a 2:30 entrance time. From years of baseball games and concerts my immediate though was that he was a scalper, but when he didn’t follow up with a price, I knew hew wasn’t. We looked at the time. It was 2:29 and we said absolutely. Apparently, two people in their group couldn’t make it and he saw us talking to the park ranger and assumed we were asking about tickets and offered them to us. We couldn’t believe it.

It was a day that could have gone very differently, but instead it became a day of luck.