August is a month when a lot of people from the Washington, D.C., area go someplace else for a week or two. But August is also when a lot of people from someplace else go to Washington. Such a trip often starts this way:

A person who lives here -- we`ll call her Suzy -- gets a call from friends in another part of the country. They want to see the city. They want to see everything. But they can only stay a day or two.

Suzy knows that her friends cannot possibly see everything in such a short time. Also, the weather may be very hot. There may be security delays. But Suzy wants her visitors to leave with happy memories.

So she organizes a plan for her friends. She decides they will do most of their travel in the city by foot or on Metro trains and buses. Metro is the public transportation system. That way they will not have to worry about where to leave their car.

At night, they will visit open-air memorials. During the day, the group will see museums; many are free of charge to enter. But, without a lot of time, which ones should they see?

The visitors have two children. So Suzy decides that her friends should begin at the National Museum of Natural History. This is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The first thing the children want to see is the area that shows what dinosaurs looked like millions of years ago.

The Natural History Museum is along the grassy area in Washington called the National Mall.

Next Suzy leads her friends along the Mall to the National Museum of American History. It contains all sorts of objects. There are dresses worn by the wives of presidents. There is a walking stick that Benjamin Franklin gave to George Washington, America`s first president. Franklin was a statesmen, writer and inventor. The collections in the American History Museum also include objects from popular culture of today.

The guests have walked a lot so far. They see a table, but they cannot sit at it. This is the table where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence from Britain in seventeen seventy-six.

Next, the visitors walk over to the most popular museum in the world. Each year as many as ten million people visit the National Air and Space Museum. Suzy points out some of the most famous things. One is the command vehicle from the Apollo Eleven spacecraft. In nineteen-sixty-nine, Apollo Eleven carried the first astronauts to land on the moon. The visitors all touch the moon rock that is also on display in the museum.