continued… The third room on the third floor of the Charles building was similar to the first two that we’d already seen: very large, spacious rooms filled with large paintings and some other types of art.

There were also exhibits in the walkway that ran along the perimeter of the courtyard below.

We went down to the second floor, which was labeled as Sculpture Court and Collector’s study. The courtyard was dotted with Greek/Roman-looking statues.

This was the first floor entryway to the Charles building, where you can see the staircase that led up to the courtyard on the second floor.

Like the third floor, there was a series of rooms that ran along the north and south sides of the courtyard. While the rooms on this floor were probably about as wide as above, they weren’t nearly as long, so there were probably 3 – 4 rooms in the same space as one room above. Keith hit pay dirt in the very first room that we walked into! It was an exhibit that was filled with armor and weapons. Keith was finally happy!

A sign said that armor was often decoratively displayed in the entryway of a wealthy person’s home. Ah, so the weapons display at the Virginia Governor’s Palace wasn’t as unique as we’d thought.

The next room was focused on biological sciences, which means it had a a lot of dead creatures. Keith was grossed out. But there were quite a few paintings, sculptures and other works of art, too.

The next two rooms were more like the exhibits upstairs, with the focus being on paintings.

Once we finished the south side, we went to the series of rooms on the north side of the courtyard. It was an exhibit on art of the indigenous people in Latin America. It felt different than the other collections because it was mostly small items, whereas the rest of the rooms had many large items.

At this point, we were feeling done with the day. Our brains were full and we were tired of being on our feet. We hadn’t seen the 2nd floor of the Centre building yet, we hadn’t gone down to the first floor of either building to see the temporary exhibits, and we had yet to set foot in the Hackerman House.

Since we’d thought the Walter’s Museum would be small, we’d also planned to go to the Peabody Library across the street. We’d been told it was one of the most beautiful libraries in the world and had been encouraged to visit it. But we couldn’t even manage to drag ourselves over there to pop our heads inside. We caught a ride share back to the boat for the evening. And once again, we made it back in time for the sunset.