It was a tremendous early fall weekend in the District.

OK. This place has been open for a few months now, but I finally got down there yesterday and I was amazed. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum and Portrait Gallery are really worth the trip, and they'll be even better once the special exhibitions open up so you can actually enjoy the museum as it was designed, in a square that allows you to go from end to end without having to double-back.

I was very impressed with the contemporary art layout -- a nice open space that doesn't seem like a warehouse (sorry, but that's how both the Baltimore Museum's contemporary area and the L.A.'s MOCA felt to me -- as much as both of those are still amazing museums). My son particularly enjoyed the folk art area, especially "Devil in a Casket with She Devil and Evangelist," pictured below:

My daughter was most impressed with the echo that her voice could make in the halls, especially if she shrieked at her highest pitch.

They've combined sculpture, painting, and furnishings in several sections that provides a very different feel from, say the National Gallery of Art's West Wing, where sculpture is mainly confined to the basement. Walking through the gilded age section, for example, provides the visitor with a chance to see several components of the aesthetic movement all at once so as to get a real sense of the "lifestyle" desired by the practitioners and patrons of the movement.

We followed that up by a trip to the fountain at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, which to my mind is the closest I've come to feeling that I'm not in DC but rather in a foreign city. It's hard to explain that sense, but perhaps it's the trees cutting off the view of the massive buildings surrounding the garden or the couples and families and friends sitting together on the benches talking or reading or just in contemplation, but there's a cloistered yet friendly feel to the place.