DC Part 5 – Ben’s Chili Bowl

May 8, 2025May 8, 2025Leave a comment

The final sketches from our recent trip to Washington DC were very different from the other places, as this is not a museum or a marble monument, but a humble diner up on U Street, a few stops up from downtown on the Metro. This is Ben’s Chili Bowl. I’d seen it in an Anthony Bourdain episode on TV and even the thought of it made me feel hungry, indeed I’m feeling peckish right now thinking about those cheesy fries. Ben’s Chili Bowl is, as the sign says, a proper historic Washington landmark, having been an important local staple during DC’s era of the fight for civil rights. This area around U Street is historically known as the ‘Black Broadway‘, with the large Lincoln Theatre next door to Ben’s being one of the most iconic venues of a cultural and musical renaissance showing acts like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. A couple of blocks down, the Bohemian Caverns (formerly Crystal Caverns and originally Club Caverns when it opened in 1926) was the preeminent jazz club of the city. While Ben’s wasn’t here during the golden age of jazz, it opened in 1958 by Ben and Virginia Ali in a period of great cultural change in DC, a time when segregation was only just starting to end. Martin Luther King Jr regularly ate here, and the March on Washington in 1963 led to the Civil Rights Bill; Ben and Virginia were there and donated food to the marchers. During and after the DC Riots of 1968 Ben’s kept its doors open to provide food and shelter. Check out this fascinating interview with Mrs. Virginia Ali, widow of Ben and co-founder of the diner, who tells some amazing stories. You can learn more about Ben’s Chili Bowl on their website (but it will make you hungry).

I had the cheesy fries (not being a meaty chili eater myself) and sat inside to sketch quickly; I only did outlines and the people because I wanted to eat my cheesy fries, and go outside the draw the outside. Next door to Ben’s is a bar called ‘Ben’s Next Door’ which was quite popular, but I didn’t go inside. A massive group of schoolkids arrived with their teacher on some sort of field trip, and they were all going into Ben’s for a milkshake after looking at the large murals in the alley between Ben’s and the Lincoln Theatre, ‘Ben Ali Way’. The murals were painted a few years ago and show a series of black leaders and heroes, with the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama prominent at the alley’s entrance. Obama came here in 2009, knowing what an important landmark this was during the civil rights era. I miss them.

And so that concludes our little trip to DC, it was an interesting place and I’m glad I finally went; if I ever come back, I would want to spend more time in the museums, appreciating them while we can, and then come back up to Ben’s for some more cheesy fries. Next up, sketches from our trip to New York City. There are a lot!

DC part 4 – Dinosaurs and Co

May 6, 2025May 5, 20252 Comments

I walked across Capitol Mall towards the hotel, and stopped into the National Museum of Natural History, which still had about an hour and a half before closing time. I love that it’s free to enter the Smithsonian. If it wasn’t for my sketchbook I could have still seen a lot more of that museum, but I wanted to draw dinosaurs. Or rather, Dinosaurs And Other Prehistoric Creatures. The dinosaur displays at the Smithsonian are pretty great, and I did see as many as I could in such a short time, but I really wanted to draw the skeleton of the Tyrannosaurus Rex biting into the frill of a stricken Triceratops. It was a real frill-seeker. The museum was quite busy, and this was a popular display. Poor Triceratops though.

Nearby was this ashen-boned skull of an Allosaurus, another of my favourite dinosaurs when I was a kid. As with so many things, my all-time top-five dinosaur (and other prehistoric creatures) list was established when I was about five or six from the two very important dinosaur books I owned (one of which I still have, ‘Dinosaurs Discovered’ by John Gilbert), and specifically from the Guy Michel artwork inside. This was back when dinosaurs stood upright like people or kangaroos, letting their tails trail on the floor behind them, the good old days. One of those favourites was the Allosaurus, which I think I liked more than the T-Rex because it had three fingers instead of two on each arm. A bit like Mourinho holding up three fingers to show how many Premier Leagues he has won. I still remember being a young dinosaur lover, going to the Natural History Museum with my big sister, and still have my original pronunciations of prehistoric words in my head, like the ‘cretackus’ period, or the ‘velo-kee-raptor’, or the great feathered ‘archie-oper-terrix’. I wouldn’t say those now, but Diplodocus is and always will be ‘diplo-DOcus’, not ‘di-PLOD-uckus’, none of that nonsense. Allosaurus is easy enough to pronounce, although this one being ‘Fragilis’ reminded me of A Christmas Story, the box marked ‘fra-gile’ which must have been Italian.

One creature whose name I’ve grudgingly accepted isn’t pronounced my way is Dimetrodon (more ‘di-MET-rodon’ and not ‘DYMER-TRODON’, whatever).I say creature because this one is not actually a dinosaur, coming from a much earlier time period, the early Permian period (the Cisuralian epoch of that period if we are being precise, and there was no way five year old Pete was pronouncing Cisuralian without bursting into laughter, even forty-nine year old Pete thinks it’s funny). This one was on my top five list for sure, because I had a plastic toy of it and it had that cool sail on it’s back. Did you ever have those old plastic toy dinosaurs? I don’t mean like flimsy easy to break ones, no these ones were completely indestructible. In the early 1980s when we were all having nightmares about nuclear war (we still get those, don’t we fellow Gen-X-ers!) I knew for a fact that the only things that would survive a nuclear bomb were cockroaches and my toy dinosaurs. Even though this is not a dinosaur, as far as I am concerned it is part of the club. It’s like John Hagen, he was part of the Corleone family, but they would always remind him he was German-Irish and not really Sicilian. I had never seen a Dimetrodon skeleton in the, er, flesh, so I had to sketch this beauty. You would not mess with this. I’d like to see fight between a Saltwater Crocodile and a Dimetrodon, or Luca Brasi and a Dimetrodon. Things were better in the old Permian period though weren’t they, not like now. There weren’t all these ‘continents’ that you have nowadays, it was just one continent, Pangaea, and one ocean, Panthalassa. It was just better wasn’t it. If you were a Dimetrodon back in the old Cisuralian epoch, you could walk from Gondwana to Laurasia and not get hassled by ice ages. Then all the continents started breaking up, egos got involved, the dinosaurs came along, the Atlantic Ocean started filling up, and now there’s all this.

Before the museum’s closing time, which as coming at me like a steam train, I decided to fast forward several hundred million years to the Time of Mammals. The continents were not quite where they are now but they were well on the way, I think India was still sailing through it’s Ocean, leaving Antarctica very much out in the cold, and England had just started counting it’s ‘years of hurt’ since winning the World Cup. This is the Uintatherium Anceps (I’m not even going to try to pronounce that, I couldn’t even spell it while writing the word down from a sign), which was an early ungulate relative from Wyoming, you’ve all had those relatives. I think it was a bit like a massive rhino, but with big tusks like a Smilodon. Elongated Tusks were still quite fashionable back then, before everyone realized how weird they were. This skull is an amazing shape though, you wouldn’t want to tread on a plastic toy of this, never mind Lego blocks.

And then the people came around to tell me that the museum was closing, and the last thing I wanted was to get stuck in the museum. I’ve seen those films, they are very scary. I walked back out onto Capitol Mall with a book full of new sketches, and then decided to go and do some more. See you in DC Part 5.

DC part 3 – Day at the Smithsonian

May 5, 2025Leave a comment

I was super excited to finally visit the Smithsonian, one of the greatest (maybe the greatest?) collection of museums in the world, all free entry, an absolute gift to the world. I obviously go to these places now with filling a sketchbook in mind, but I’m actually just super interested in all the history on display, and eager to see it all. When I was a kid, I remember my mum’s friend Terri went to America and visited the Smithsonian, bringing me back a pen from the National Air and Space Museum, one of those special pens that astronauts use that can write upside down. I imagined astronauts up there writing postcards, or drawing. I was delighted to see the gift shop still selling these gimmicky pens, but I treasured the one I had when I was a kid and would show it off at primary school. Of course I would just write the words upside down, wondering why astronauts needed to write upside down words, possibly to confuse any hostile alien life forms they encountered, or maybe like when you see ambulances display the word ‘ambulance’ backwards so motorists can read it in their wing mirrors. It’s all part of astronaut training I suppose. Now I like to draw airplanes (I say aeroplanes) even though they are a bit difficult, they are fascinating. The wings are always a lot longer than you expect. You really need those double-page panoramic spreads in the old Moleskine. Above, a whole selection of planes drawn from the second floor. There was a large section of the Museum that was not open to the public, unfortunately, which according to the man included the plane called ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ (I am glad I never asked about that plane, because as established in a previous post I would definitely pronounce it wrong). Still, I wasn’t disappointed. We spent a lot of time doing the slow museum-walking around checking it all out, until we needed an overpriced snack, after which the family left while I stayed to sketch.

Now this here above is one of history’s greatest bits of technology. I draw a lot of stuff, fire hydrants, trees, but once in a while I get to draw an actual piece of significant human history. this is the Apollo 11 Command Module, Columbia, the actual thing that the other fellow sat in while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear (sorry, Aldrin) gallivanted about on the surface of the Moon. They were faffing about making small steps and playing golf or whatever, while up in space the other fellow, Michael Collins (not that one, Irish history fans) had to stay in the car. A bit like when you’re a kid and you have to wait in the car while your dad and your uncle go to the pub. It’s amazing to look at it and think that is the actual module, the real thing that went to space, that we all learned about at school (except in conspiracy-theory states). I’m standing there just inches from history, and it’s a tiny tin can. Definitely had to draw this. I also had to draw some of the space suits on display, see below. Imagine having to wear that. Being an astronaut is no walk in the park. I remember seeing this really realistic film when I was a kid called SpaceCamp which taught me exactly what real astronaut training must be like, and that ended my dream of being a space traveller.

Speaking of space, there was another piece of history on display, a life-size actual X-Wing fighter, suspended high above the seats next to the bathroom. I sat and drew that, of course I did. It was a T-70 model, which as you know is from the Resistance era, the sort Poe Dameron would fly, not Luke Skywalker. Strange that it had a little model of R2-D2 in it and not BB-8. I prefer the Rebellion era X-Wings, because their engines don’t split in half for some reason when they lock S-foils into attack position. What do I know. The X-Wing is like the Spitfire of Star Wars. Or maybe it’s like the F-16, I love an F-16, and the Naboo Starfighter is like the Spitfire. Oh I don’t know, it’s a pretend spaceship.

Still we came a long long way from what came first, which was the original Wright Brothers flyer, from 1903, as flown on that fateful day at Kitty Hawk. Here it is below, the real actual one. It reminded me a little of the Ewok gliders, but as you know the Ewoks could only glide from the trees, they were not technologically advanced enough to achieve take-off. This though is another piece of real actual history. Sure, we would have figured it out in the end, but from the moment humans learned to fly, figuring out how to both take off and land, well that was it. Game over. Of course Wilbur/Orville (below, the one who looks like the conductor from the Polar Express) was obviously lying in it backwards as we all now know, but back then they just didn’t know any better. It still looks more comfortable than flying Virgin Atlantic economy.

The day was moving away from me fast, and I can only draw so much in such a short period of time. I spent a lot of time looking at racecars, but it was time to go and draw dinosaurs…

DC part 2 – Monuments and Memorials

April 30, 2025April 30, 2025Leave a comment

Time to explore Washington DC. On our first full day we were heading over towards the Washington Monument and taking a hike around that big lake, the one that Captain America was running around in Winter Soldier. I wanted to see the Massive Lincoln as well. This is the DC we see in all the films and on the telly. The Washington Monument (above) might not be a particularly interesting subject to draw, basically being a gigantic version of Cleopatra’s Needle the size of a skyscraper, but it’s a quick thing to draw so I sketched it while we rested our feet on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. It’s a long walk round that lake you know. I had wanted to get up and run around it saying “on your left”, but I’ve been a bit lazy with the running since my 10k last November, so I didn’t do that. The day started out quite cool, but it was sunny and warmed up to a very springing day, and my face even caught a bit too much sun. The cherry blossoms were maybe not as pink as my sketchbook page shows, but that’s how my eyes saw them, optimistically. Give them a few more days and they’d have been brighter, but right now they were just starting to bloom. The splashes of pink added some contrast to this serene and austere environment, and a lot of people were out wearing pink as well, I know a lot of people came here specifically for the blossoms. Incidentally I didn’t see anywhere near as many of ‘those’ hats as expected, at least not on anyone’s heads. Quite a few being sold cheap by street hawkers, but the only one I saw an actual person wearing was when a guy put one on for a selfie by the Washington Monument before quickly putting it back into his bag. Indeed. We didn’t go up the Monument (I’ve seen Spider-Man: Homecoming, that’s close enough for me) but it really is massive. I did get a stamp though for my sketchbook. I didn’t sketch the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, but I have to say I really loved that place. Jefferson’s statue is pretty huge, but no more lofty than the ideals and proclamations written around the interior of the building. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” When you are in there, you really feel it, like this is a monument to those great ideas themselves that Americans all know (or rather, should know), as much as to the man. We took a lot of photos, but we had a long walk yet around the Tidal Basin so we moved on.

I really enjoyed seeing the Monument to Martin Luther King Jr. It was a way past the FDR Memorial. This only opened in 2011, and shows a sculpture of Dr. King emerging from the rock, designed by Lei Yixin. The National Park Service manages all these (long may they continue, long live the National Parks!) so I got the little stamp. I sketched fast in pencil, we were getting hungry. There are many of Dr. King’s quotes around the memorial, great words such as “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It was genuinely inspiring. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere“. This monument was unveiled on the anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech which was of course given here in Washington DC at the Lincoln Memorial, and we were headed there next.

On the way there, we passed the Korean War Veterans Memorial, which was very poignant. On the other side of the Reflecting Pool was the Vietnam veterans Memorial, even more so. All the names of those soldiers who died in that conflict were engraved in order of when they fell, and gave me a chill. I didn’t grow up here, but as a kid in Britain the impact of that war was clear on so much American popular culture. We had a snack nearby, and finally went up the Lincoln Memorial. It is at the top of a steep staircase, looking down the long Pool towards the Washington Memorial and down to the Capitol Building; you know the view, it’s pretty famous. Inside is the massive statue of Abraham Lincoln, one of the most famous American Presidents. A lot of people were in here to get a look at him, sitting on what looks like Thanos’s floating throne. You gotta love Lincoln. Even without his big hat you’d recognize him from his beard. Inside the Memorial written on the walls are the words of his most famous speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the other one, from his second Inauguration. “With malice toward none, with charity for all…” It had been a long day. We decided to walk back to the hotel and rest those exhausted legs, and only stopped to catch a view of the distant White House far behind barriers and armed vehicles. I was glad for the deep bathtub, and for the hearty southern-style meal we had that night.

I got up early next morning, and did some sketching before breakfast. It was raining a little, but not too bad. I walked back down to Capitol Mall, which was mostly empty, and stood in the middle with a great view of the Capitol Building. This was as close as I got, it is very big. Reminded me of the Capitol Records logo; also reminded of that bloody awful day on January 6th 2021, a low point. This place has seen some history, has it not. I took a couple of photos for passing tourists, but it was a pretty quiet morning overall. All around me there were the buildings of the Smithsonian Museum, our destination that day, and the thing I was most most excited about coming to DC for. You have to see the Monuments, but I was here to see the stuff, and I mostly wanted to see planes, spaceships and dinosaurs. More on that next time. But before we did, we stopped into the building below, the National Archives. I sketched from across the street until it started raining a bit more (then I finished it up later at the hotel), but we came in after breakfast to take a look at one thing only – the United States Constitution. And the Bill of Rights, that’s two things. The actual Constitution itself, and the actual Bill of Rights, housed in their own special rotunda decorated with paintings of the great acts, the signing of the Constitution and the other one, the Declaration of Independence, because that actual document is also in here. Three things, that’s three things we came to see. The ‘Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom’. We didn’t stay too long, you’re not allowed to spend time trying to read them, it was a little crowded and we needed a bit of air and some space, so we left and walked over to the National Air and Space Museum.

DC part 1 – the Federal Triangle

April 28, 2025May 1, 20252 Comments

And so, we visited Washington DC, the nation’s capital, for the first time. We had planned this about a year ago, before the Current Political Atmosphere (aka the Current Reality of American Politics, if we want acronyms), but we wanted to see some History. We took the DC Metro from the airport down to the Federal Triangle to find our hotel, which was right in the middle of History. The Waldorf Astoria was pretty nice – amazing what you can get with points – with top hatted men opening doors and asking us about our ‘driver’ (mate we came by tube), but was built into the old Post Office Building, on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th. This place has real American History. It is also the second highest building in DC, after the Washington Monument – this is not a city of skyscrapers, more a city of lofty ideas. It was also the start of Cherry Blossom season – while most of them had not yet started really blossoming, the pink buds were starting to come out. Right outside the hotel was a statue of Benjamin Franklin, one of the most well-known of the Founding Fathers. I sketched him below, after drawing the hotel (above) on our first morning. We did actually go up the clock tower (properly called the Old Post Office Tower), which is a national historic monument (with a separate entrance outside the hotel) and admire the views across DC, though I did not sketch from up there.

I won’t post all my DC sketches in one go because it’s a lot of reading and writing, so I’ll just post these few and then we can take a sketched tour of DC after that, before sketching our way through New York City. Below is the view from our bedroom window. Our bedroom was pretty impressive, including a big chandelier and a very deep bathtub. The building across from us was the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building. This whole area is full of federal government buildings, all those ones you hear about constantly on the news. It reminded us very much of being in Whitehall. The IRS was next door to us. The FBI were around the corner.

I had to sketch at least one DC fire hydrant, for the collection, so I drew the one below opposite the hotel. I had been hoping that maybe the hydrants here had Abraham Lincoln style hats. We were very close to the Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was famously shot dead by John Wilkes Booth. I mean, if you are going to wear a big hat like that in the theatre. These days someone would film the argument and put it on Instagram for clicks and likes. This ended up being the only hydrant I drew in DC, but I did draw a lot of other stuff so join me next time to see some more.

across the country, by plane and by train

April 24, 2025Leave a comment

During Spring Break, our family took a trip across the breadth of the country to Washington DC and New York. For a few years now we have been using our Spring Breaks to see more of the USA, alternating between national parks and big cities, and this year we decided to visit ‘Our Nation’s Capital’ (as they call it here) and the ‘Big Apple’ (I don’t know if you’ve heard of that but that’s what they call New York). Of course when we travel I must also sketch, what else am I going to do, watch a movie? I did that too, and read a book (Agatha Christie ‘And Then There Were None’, which I finished on the train to New York). Above, the Southwest flight we took to St. Louis. I’ve not ever been to St. Louis, but we flew right over the big Gateway Arch, which was exciting, and then stopped at the airport to listen to the very different accents while waiting for an overpriced lunch. I can’t pronounce St. Louis, I never know whether to add the ‘s’ sound at the end or not, despite hearing it and being told, when I actually come to say it, my brain forgets and I choose the wrong one. A bit like whenever I need to plug in a USB, *every*single*time* I will plug it in the wrong way round first. This is called the ‘USB Law’, or the ‘St. Louis Principle’. We flew from St. Louis to DC, but I didn’t bother drawing that short flight, and caught up on some Agatha Christie instead.

After a couple of days exploring Washington’s museums and monuments, we caught the Amtrak train from Union Station, finding ourselves cramped into large seats with no legroom, looking out of a small window as the marshy landscape whizzed by. This is an America I have not seen, the East Coast where there are lots of little states and big cities around large estuaries, very far away from our dry sunny California. I love a train, watching the landscape change and wondering what will come next. I finished reading Agatha (the butler did it; only joking) and sketched. We passed through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and then the skyscrapers started to come into view as we approached New York, my favourite city after London.

Well New York was fun, but it was time to fly back to California. Thanks to the magic of airline points wer were able to fly back in business class, which was luxury with those little compartments, massive screens, lie-flat seats (with no cushions) and metal cutlery. I sat in the compartment next to my 17 year old and watched Avengers Infinity War. I was going to watch Conclave but thought I should save that for when the Pope died, which unfortunately he did just a few days ago. A shame, I liked Pope Francis. The flight took us all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, and I was still excited by all of our wanderings about New York City. Lots of sketches to post soon.

And finally the last leg, Phoenix to Sacramento, after a couple of hours in a lounge at PHX. We had the bigger seats for this leg as well, and while I did sketch a bit I relaxed and watched another old film, Withnail and I. I’ve not seen it in years. We made it back to Davis tired and in need of a cup of tea and a long sleep, more adventures around the country. I’ll post all my sketches soon.