Yipeee! The National Museum of American History reopened today.

By now several of you know I do a *lot* of traveling as part of my day job in high tech. Last year I flew about 80,000 miles, and feel particularly horrible about this given my role at work includes driving the company's sustainability initiatives. And although I was able to bow out of a trip to Gothenburg, Sweden this week and instead participated in my meeting via videoconference here in Boston (boring, but cheap and low eco-impact), so far the technologies still have not yet replaced the power of face-to-face communications. I don't mean the actual meetings, of course, but rather all the dialogue that often takes place informally before and after.

So in that vein, this weekend I head to Washington DC to put to rest my sense of incompleteness at having not been able to visit my all-time favorite museum during a business trip I took there about three months ago. I'm referring to the American Museum of Natural History, which reopened today after a two-year renovation. This is the place known to many as the place where the original Star Spangled Banner upon which our national anthem is based currently resides, but it's also where you can find Abraham Lincoln's hand-written draft of the Gettysburg Address, Julia Child's kitchen, Dorothy's ruby-red shoes from the Wizard of Oz, and even some electronic marvels such as an electric marshmellow toaster!

It's one of the most eclectic hodgepodge places I've ever seen (and I say this having visited museums in pretty much all of the 45 countries I've visited in my lifetime), and based on reviews I read this week in the New York Times and elsewhere, the renovation has not done much to bring coherence and clarity to the overall structure (though I understand more renovations are coming). The articles do point out, however, that while the lack of cohesion has always been a problem during the museum's history - it doesn't help that we're talking about over 3 million items that encapsulate the good, bad and ugly of the American culture - it's the almost random encounter with incredibly symbolic, important artifacts which is what makes this one of the most extraordinary human-created places on earth.

So that's why rather than visit the National Air and Space Museum day 1 (which I'll do instead the next day, as I remain a techno/aero geek at heart), I plan to be smack in the middle of the 3-day festivities across the mall about noontime this Sunday. Does life get any better?