Over the Thanksgiving weekend, my daughter and I took a drive up Washington D.C. to play tourist. She wanted to see the Panda bears and Corsairs so among the other various things, we did the zoo and both parts of the Air and Space Museum. On the way up there, we stopped in Quantico, VA to visit the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. Being the very proud son of a Marine, I've waited for this museum to open for a long time. Being a lover of Corsairs and very proud Granddaughter of a Marine, my daughter was anxious to see it as well.
This museum is without a doubt one of the best I've ever seen. The Marines have a long and very proud tradition and it is well displayed here. We arrived about twenty minutes before they opened on Friday morning and I'm glad we did. When we left, over two hours later, there were nearly 1,000 people there.
The HRS-2 is sitting in the floor; the FG1D Corsair is mounted way up at the top of the museum's atrium. It's looks really nice but it's so high up that you can't really see it. The -4 is mounted level with the balcony, along with the Jenny and Harrier. They are all easily seen. The Wildcat, TBM, Baka, DH-4, Panther, HO-3 and Huey are up where it's hard to photograph them or even see them.
The other displays of Marine history are very good and it can take a while to see and read everything. The gift shop has a huge selection of Marine related items. We bought my Dad a letter opener that looks like a K-bar combat knife. This was done at my daughter's instance; she said "Hey Daddy, we have to buy that K-bar for Papa! It's just like the one he killed Charlie with in the war!"
If I could complain about one thing though....I sure wish they had built a larger building so they could display the airplanes a little better. The old museum at Quantico had a lot more stuff that isn't in this museum. Some of it got loaned out and some of it is still in storage. The museum is going to have additions over the next few years and is going to be quite a bit bigger. Hopefully my complaints won’t apply after that.
It seems to be a trend that museums construct buildings that are more architecturally fancy than they need to be and this often takes away from display space. The way the Marine Museum's roof goes up 200ft and is supposed to resemble the flag raising on Iwo Jima looks really neat but it creates LOTS of unusable space. It would have been nice to see the money spent to make the museum bigger, with more stuff in it, rather than so fancy. Oh yea, the parking lot REALLY needs to get bigger. When we left, people were parked all over the grass and on the shoulders of the roads.
Overall, it is a very fitting tribute to the Marines.
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