Over the Thanksgiving break I got to visit the Newseum for the first time with my kids and my best friend and her family.

When the Newseum first opened in 1997, it was located in my old hometown in Arlington, Virginia. The seven-level, 250,000 square foot museum moved to its present location at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, right next to the Canadian Embassy and overlooking the Capitol and the White House in 2008.

From the Greenspun Terrace you get fabulous, panoramic views of the city…perfect for taking pictures!

Tickets ($21.95 for adults and $12.95 for youth aged 7-18) are good for two days, and you really could spend a whole two days at the museum. I made the mistake of parking in a three hour spot, thinking that would be an ample amount of time. Having only managed to get through half the museum in three hours, I had to leave and re-park the car again.

There’s a great mix of traditional and interactive exhibits. The first exhibit we checked out was the Berlin Wall Gallery. Here you can find the largest piece of the Wall outside of Germany.

The kids were duly impressed to learn that I had my own piece of the Berlin Wall back at our house. I chipped it off shortly after the fall of the wall, when friends and I visited Berlin as college students. 

The kids especially loved the HP New Media Gallery on the fourth level:

and the NBC News Interactive Newsroon on the second level, where they could pretend to be journalists and record their own newscasts with the help of prompters: