DC tourists frustrated by museum closures as shutdown persists
Millions of tourists visit Smithsonian every year
[NEW YORK] Daniel Claxton arrived in Washington over the weekend with his family to see all the highlights of the nation’s capital. But the government shutdown is putting a damper on the trip.
Sunday marked the first day that the Smithsonian Institution museums, which include the National Zoo, were closed because of the impasse between Senate Democrats and Republicans over extending health-care subsidies, a roadblock to a spending bill that’s led to the shutdown.
The Smithsonian gets about 62 per cent of its funding from Congress, federal grants and contracts, as well as from private funding and visitors’ shopping for concessions. Millions of tourists visit it every year.
As soon as Claxton and his family arrived in DC on Saturday (Oct 11) from Huntsville, Alabama, they visited three Smithsonian museums, eager to see as much as possible because they knew it was the last day the buildings would be open.
“We would have cancelled, but the kids were excited to fly here and cancelling the hotels for a big group of people is not cheap,” said Claxton, who is a federal defence contractor with some of his own workers idled.
“We had scheduled a Capitol Hill tour, a National Archives tour, a Library of Congress tour, all of that. Now, I don’t know if they will happen.”
The family’s plan now is to go to the privately funded museums in DC and to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate, in Virginia. “We may have to reschedule a trip one day in some years to show them everything we will miss, when the kids are older because it’s an expensive trip to come here.”
At the National Mall that’s ringed by the Smithsonian museums, two tourists were riding bicycles Sunday past the National Museum of African American History, the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of Natural History, hoping one of them would be open.
One of the cyclists, a woman from Germany who asked not to be identified, said she had not known the museums, a planned highlight of her visit, would be closed. The tourist said that she first arrived in Canada for a work trip and decided she would also tour some US cities, including Washington, New York and Chicago. While the woman said she does not fully understand the shutdown, she said it seems unusual from a German perspective. BLOOMBERG
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