DEPENDING ON TRAFFIC, where you're coming from, and a few other variables, getting to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center can be a bit of a trek. But if you're in any way a fan of the Air and Space mother ship downtown on the National Mall, it's a trek worth taking. If you don't have a car, rent one. Take Metrobus to Dulles International and transfer to a Virginia Regional Transit Association bus for the short hop to the center. And how many museums offer directions to visit by air? Click here.

IN OCTOBER, CURATOR and historian Estella Chung will give a lecture titled ''D.C.'s Downton Abbey in a Mad Men Era.'' Of course the talk is about -- and occurs at -- Marjorie Merriweather Post's Hillwood Estate, nestled in the leafy hills of upper Northwest D.C. off Rock Creek Park. Click here.

AT THE START of the 1970s, Faith Ringgold was commissioned to paint a mural for the female detention center at Rikers Island. One prisoner asked her ''to paint the road out of here.'' In response, Ringgold painted aspirational images of women: a female doctor, a female bus driver, a female president, even a white mother holding a mixed-race child. ''When she was painting this, most of those things were not reality -- women didn't hold those positions,'' says Kathryn Wat of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), adding with a laugh: ''Now, we've ticked off almost all of them, except the woman president. But we'll see in a few years if we change that.'' Click here.

"I THINK WE all realize that what we might have liked in our 20s versus age 40 may be very different,'' says the Phillips Collection's Elsa Smithgall. Art appreciation, like so many other things, can be funny like that. Maybe, for example, the younger version of you found the works of Matisse and Cézanne not only baffling but utterly ''ridiculous,'' even ''detestable'' -- but despite those initial harsh impressions you've come around to liking the works of these European masters and others, including van Gogh and Picasso. So much so, you'd like to add them to your permanent collection. Click here. 

PLUS: D.C. Area Museum Listings through Fall 2013