Remember field trips of your school days? You escaped from chores and homework to explore an exciting place and came home excited to tell your mom and dad about your travels. You might have come to see the works of Renoir at the Columbus Museum of Art. Well, the people at CMA want adults to take part of the excitement of field trips, so they planned a couple for the grownups. You choose—a day trip right around the corner or a long weekend this fall to our nation’s capital. Art Escapes makes a day trip on August 9. The first stop will be Findlay to experience the Mazza Museum, which houses the largest collection of children’s book illustrations in the world. With more than 10,000 works, many are winners of such prestigious awards as the Caldecott and the Newbery Medals. From there, day travelers head to the Toledo Museum of Art to check out the exhibit, The Berlin Painter and His World: Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C. This exhibition includes works on loan from the British Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; J. Paul Getty Museum; Vatican’s Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, and Musée du Louvre. November 4-6, join Nannette Maciejunes, David Stark, and Nancy Turner as Art Escapes heads to Washington D.C. to check out Vermeer, Renoir and their contemporaries at The National Gallery. The exhibition brings together 65 works in Age in Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, and it features 10 paintings by Vermeer, many of which have not been seen in the United States since 1996. It’s pretty sweet to know that the days of field trips aren’t over once you grow up, and it’s even cooler to know that local experts will make the excursion even better. Want more info on both these programs? Get all the details here.