Try to Act Your Espionage: Spy In the City

| Print Post This | Like (0) | Comments (0)

MUSEUMS ARE a summer staple, even for non-tourists, if only because you can hang out for hours and know that someone else is paying for the air conditioning. So when we heard about a new outdoor component to one of D.C.'s newer showplaces, the International Spy Museum, we were skeptical.

Spy In the City, which opened in mid-June, is the first of a planned series of outdoor "missions" at the Spy Museum. Here's how it works: you pick up a GPS device with a screen, some headphones and various important-looking buttons — let very young children share with an adult. You go outside the museum and the device tells you where to go and what to look for in order to solve the mystery.

The 90-minute adventure is well-constructed — certainly easier for natives than for tourists who will walk the wrong way looking for Ford's Theatre, but not so easy that you won't have fun. Surprisingly, running around Penn Quarter with little electronic devices attracts a lot of attention, including that of a friendly FBI policeman who opined "I bet I'd be good at that!" One warning: though generally you collect clues from your surroundings, there is one semi-obscure piece of trivia you just have to know. But if you guess wrong enough times, the device gives you hints that enable you to finish the game.

The adventure is more exciting than anything inside a museum can be, because nothing can control for the unpredictability of the city. When you need to look at a monument and there happens to be a crazy man standing on it, screaming at you about damnation — well, you just have to adapt. It's not exactly driving a getaway car through Kabul, but it's more exciting than anything you'll see in the Postal Museum — except maybe the monster truck.

The museum plans to follow this up with two more outdoor missions (one shorter, one longer) in the coming months. For now, each GPS device you rent costs $14 — but you can share! You can also get a discount if you choose to take the adventure and buy admission to the museum at the same time. Yes, we know: paying for a museum goes against everything we, as a city, stand for. Suck it up.

» International Spy Museum, 800 F St. NW; $14; 202-393-7798, spymuseum.org. (Gallery Place)

Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/AP