You might be thinking, “I didn’t even know the US Army has a museum.”

Just a few years ago, there was not one, but now I am happy to report that the US Army does in fact have its very own museum. It is very close to Washington D.C., on an Army base named Fort Belvoir. And it is a fun one too.

Also, I will tell you, Fort Benning has a similar one that is called the National Infantry Museum, but it does not encompass the entirety of the United States Army branch. In fact, many of the branches within the Army have their own museum.

The one in D.C. is unique because it is for the whole Army. Its official name is the National Museum of the United States Army.

This museum takes you through the history of the U.S. Army and shows a little of what the Army is doing today as well. It tells the story of the brave men and women who have fought for our freedom through displays, real artifacts, and a lot of interactive fun stuff too.

Actually, there is way more here than you would expect, so I am going to tell ya all about what to expect when you visit.

When to go:

This museum is open every single day of the year, except for Christmas day. You can’t beat that.

Their hours are 9am-5pm.

We went on September, 11th, a Monday, and it was not crowded at all. In fact, it was ghost town in there, and I was just hoping they won’t go out of business because it was an excellent museum, especially if you are traveling with wiggly kids like we were.

Tickets:

Tickets are for specific times, but they are free. You can reserve them online. It was not crowded though, so you could probably get tickets at the door just fine.

Go here to reserve your time slot and date.

They do have a donation box near the door.

Is the U.S. Army Museum kid friendly?

Yes, very. There is a whole wing of hands on activities for kids, and even the normal museum exhibits have some hands-on activities, like this Army puzzle.

There are a lot of neat things to look at too. I should write a post about taking kids to museums though, because it is different than browsing on your own. We have dragged our kids (usually against their will) to museums all across America, and we have had mostly positive experiences.

However, we also do our best to keep low expectations and move quickly. This is always a little harder on the parent who is more interested in that particular museum. In the art museums in D.C., I was the one too engrossed in the paintings to realize our children were not popular with the security guards. Ha! My husband was mortified and ready to run, and I was like, “What? They’re being so good, and this place is amazing.”

At the Army Museum, Navy Museum, basically any war-related museum, Alan is the one reading everything, and I am the one asking to go to the cafe with the kids after a while.

It’s a balance. It does save the day for the quicker parent to escort the kids through a quick browse of the museum. Then when their attention span is getting stretched past their capabilities and melt downs are beginning to happen, the quick parent needs to escort the kids to a snack, play, or gift shop area.

In full disclosure, I get annoyed with adults who go through museums too slowly too. I feel like all you need to do is see the highlights, read a few plaques, get the general idea, take some fun photos, and leave. All of that takes me a couple of hours tops.

D.C. art museums aside, I am always the one with the kids on the bench at the end, waiting for the rest of the family to join us. What can possibly take them that long? I’ll never understand.

In fact, I have some good photos of me and the boys waiting on the benches for Alan or relatives, but they will not let me post them on the internet, which is fair.

We found something for everyone at this museum, even our loudest whiner. Our little whiner enjoyed the virtual reality and the cafe and the Army puzzle.

Our Army officer enjoyed everything and was probably wishing he had come without us (ha!).

Military Kid Experience

Nowhere else will you get this, and I thought it was just fantastic. They had a military kid experience quiz on a large touchscreen t.v. at the front of the interactive wing of the museum.

All four of our kids enjoyed answering the questions. It was so extremely relatable to our nomadic lifestyle. At the end of each question in the quiz, it would give what percentage of participants had chosen each answer.

The Experimental Learning Center

The interactive area is to the right of the front doors when you first walk into the museum. It is called the Experimental Learning Center, and it is unlike anything I have ever seen in a museum. This was high tech learning and lots of it. I learned science concepts in there I knew nothing about.

They have all these training modules you can participate in, and you can select the easier or the harder versions. We worked on engineering, vision wavelengths, virus studies, and all sorts of scientific concepts. I learned a lot about night vision and infrared light at one of the modules. This was all impressive.

If you have older kids, or people who enjoy this type of thing in your group, you could easily spend an hour just in this area. We did. We are definitely hands-on-learning people.

If you have younger children, you will need to let them set your pace. It can be hard sometimes to let the younger ones set the pace for your tour, but the fact is that if you don’t, you will end up with an over-tired, frustrated, crying toddler on the floor, while you are questioning all of your life choices..

Meanwhile, I had such a good time trying everything out in the Experimental Learning Center, I either forgot to take photos or they were not allowed. So don’t skip the learning center!

Extras at this Museum:

Two activities here are extra, paid add-ons. They had a flight simulator and a virtual reality Army experience next to the main exhibits of the museum. I did the flight simulator with two of our boys, and Alan did the virtual reality with the other two.

I think they were $10 extra a piece, per person. That adds up quick, so that is why three of us did one of them and the other three of us did the other.

I did enjoy the flight simulator though. It reminded me of a Universal Studios simulator I got to go on back in high school, and I thought it was fun.

The Exhibits

The exhibits are authentic and fun to look at. I thoroughly enjoyed the tour through all of America’s wars and seeing the uniform of each different generation.

We actually ran out of time to see it all. If you do not want that to happen to you, schedule your ticket earlier in the day. My husband is in the Army, and he and one of my sons took f-o-r-e-v-e-r going through this. My teenage sons, my nine-year-old, and I ended up hanging out at the cafe eating chips and drinking sodas for a while. The nine-year-old ran out of patience to finish the whole museum, and we were all hungry.

In conclusion, touring this museum is a great way to spend an afternoon with your family.

When you go places and engage in the world together as a family you cannot help but have fun. And yes, it felt like delicious bonding time with our sons.

We watched movies, tried out all the interactive stuff, did puzzles, laughed together, and complained to each other. What more could you want in a day trip? I got some delightful family shots of us at the end. They don’t let me share those.

So we went in with some unwilling participants for sure. Some of our group wanted to stay home and play x-box. But we went anyway, and we had a great time.

I highly recommend this museum to anyone. You will learn so much and have fun doing it. Plus, it instills a nice sense of patriotism that you don’t get many places.

I firmly believe we learn more from these immersive experiences than we do from school history books.

And for the full story of when we took all the kids and some of their friends to a D.C. art museum, go here.

For more fun things to do in D.C., see this article.

The post See the U.S. Army Museum in 20 Patriotic Pictures appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

A few months ago, just out of curiosity, I googled the distance from my new house to Valley Forge. I probably didn’t even know Valley Forge was in Pennsylvania, but I knew it was the site of the Revolutionary Army’s famous winter encampment of 1777-78. Much to my delight, I discovered that I live only an HOUR away! One hour!

My first thought was, “Awesome!” My second thought was, “Oh no, just how cold is this winter going to be?” because that winter of 1777 is infamous for being snow covered and freezing. I did not realize I was living quite that close to such a location.

The perfect opportunity came to drag my entire family over to Valley Forge just a week ago. They were a reluctant lot I am sorry to tell you, as they did not share my zeal for American history in the cold.

I am also sorry to report that I do not in fact live only an hour from Valley Forge. Either Google maps was wrong, or I remembered incorrectly, but the trip turned out to be more like an hour and a half. Ah well, it was a lovely trip through pretty countryside anyway. Maryland and Pennsylvania, once you leave the large cities, are beautiful states of rolling hills of farms with barns and silos.

It was cold and windy the day that we went, with snow from the last snowstorm still on the ground, which all added up to make it the perfect day to visit such a place.

We pulled into a large parking lot of the Valley Forge National Historic Park, bundled up tightly in our coats and gloves, and headed down a windy path to see General George Washington’s headquarters. I should also mention that right away we were all having a good time. My family can be strongly resistant to heading out on adventures that I want to take them on, but once they get there, they always have fun.

Valley Forge is a national park, and everything we saw was free. There is an official visitor’s center, but it was closed for construction until spring, so we did miss out on that.

You walk down this long, windy sidewalk ramp path to the large building at the bottom. At first, we thought that was Washington’s headquarters, but it is not. The first large building is actually the old Reading Railroad train station, and it has a plaque or two up about that.

Going places as a family is always amusing. I heard Alan command the boys, “Don’t throw snow. There are small children ahead.” I think someone who wasn’t listening still threw snow, which thankfully didn’t hit anyone. It was old, hard, and crunchy snow. Alan also had to say, I mean he truly had to say it because someone must have tasted it, “Don’t eat snow that is this old.” Sigh. The things we have to say!

Then we went inside the old train station, and it has several information stations about Washington’s winter at Valley Forge, complete with documentary/ reenactment videos. The boys watched the videos with a surprising level of interest. Although, at one point, John David did look up at me and ask, “Can we just go? I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Daniel, who is like our little general, he is so thoroughly interested in all things military and police, soaked this up like a sponge. He actually came home and asked to watch more YouTube videos about Valley Forge.

I read a plaque to the boys about Billy Lee, and John David waved it off saying, “Okay. I know,” to which I said, “No. You did not know that Billy Lee was the only slave that Washington freed.”

There was more information there than our troop had patience to take in, but we browsed it all, and then marched on to the actual headquarters.

One of the best things to me about the headquarters is that this is the actual building, not a reconstructed symbol, but the real deal. This house is around 250 years old, and by American standards, that is a rare find.

“…it is very certain that half the army is almost naked, in a great measure bare-footed.”

Johann de Kalb to Comte de Broglie, Valley Forge, Christmas Day 1777

The Huts

General Washington instructed all the men in his army to construct for themselves huts according to this exact pattern. They had to be uniform, and these were much nicer than tents for keeping out the cold. A whole forest was taken down to build these, and when the war was over, local farmers quickly deconstructed the little houses to use the wood, and the farm land became farm land again. Washington later visited the site and was pleased to see that it had not been permanently ruined but was once again usable for farming.

After this, we hiked back to our car. During the hike, my feet reminded me that I do still have plantar fasciitis and heel spurs. Oh well, you can’t keep a good man down, right?

We loaded up in the car and drove up an area that was either a seriously large hill or a mountain, but it was the center of where the regular soldiers camped that winter of 1777-78, and it was the extremely cold, shaded, unmelted snow side of the mountain too.

Driving Through the Entrenchments

I would say things like, “What mound? I mean, I don’t really see a mound, but whatever.”

Training for War

During that winter at Valley Forge, the men fought disease like small pox and shortages of clothes and food, but they also trained to become a better fighting Army. Washington brought in a man named Baron von Steuben to train his Army. Here is what von Steuben had to say about them, according to the Valley Forge historic park website:

the entire system of drill, evolutions, maneuvers, discipline, tactics, and Prussian formation into our Army. I should have been pelted had I attempted it, and should inevitably have failed. The genius of this nation is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians, or French. You say to your soldier [in Europe], “Do this” and he doeth it; but [at Valley Forge] I am obliged to say, “This is the reason why you ought to do that,” and then he does it. 

— Baron von Steuben to Baron de Gaudy, 1787-88

Then we came to this one area that had a cannon and a pavilion with information, so we all got out there and checked it out. This one was highly visible. You could easily tell where the giant trenches had been dug. The soldiers dug all sorts of things, but most of it was restored to normalcy after the war. In this particular area, it was left alone.

This park would be a wonderful place to go walking, as it has miles of paths, well tended and paved, but we were not looking to make a whole day of it, so we mostly drove.

After seeing the cannons, we drove around to see a few more historical markers and then headed back home, with a nice stop for ice cream on the way, of course.

Want to learn more or plan a trip to Valley Forge for yourself? Click here to visit the official park website.

The post 46 Photos and Facts of Valley Forge National Historic Park appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.