Vermont 2023 {Washington, DC}

8 October 2023 - After we left Laurel and Bret's we drove south, hitting the first of many big cities we'd hit on our return trip home. We drove through the outskirts of the Bronx, crossed the George Washington Bridge, drove the entire length of the New Jersey Turnpike (and had the tank filled by a gas station attendant - I didn't know they did that in NJ and Oregon!), drove on another Toll Road through the edge of Delaware, crossed Maryland through Baltimore, skirted around Washington, DC and arrived at our hotel in Chantilly, VA around dinner time. We ate the random odds and ends we had in our cooler and snack bags and took showers and hit the sack.

I love to see the temple!

Not sure why I took this, but the clouds are sure pretty, 
so maybe that's why?

Stir crazy cats.

I laid in bed and did some research for
our day in DC the next morning. Talk about
flying by the seat of our pants! We found out we
needed timed entry tickets to get into the Air and Space
Museum, so we snagged the time we could get at 4 pm.
We also decided to take the metro downtown instead of
drive, so all kinds of fun things to learn about that. While
I was searching for maybe getting into The White House, 
I came across this anniversary logo and saved it for Cal 
and Gregg and their latest project.

9 October 2023 - We woke up Monday morning and met Uncle Ryan in the breakfast room for waffles and sausage and cheesy omelets. Yes! Ryan made the journey up from Blacksburg where he had dropped of his kids at their mom's to spend his Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day with us in DC! We finished up our food and headed to the metro station where we bought our passes and hopped on the train. What a way to travel!

In the DC station!

Our first stop was the White House Visitor's Center, because we read that you can get Jr. Ranger books and badges there. While the kids worked on their books, we wandered around the visitor's center, which is located sort of down the block from the actual White House. It was the closest we could get to getting inside the real deal. There were lots of fun artifacts and photos and videos. The one thing I remember is that one president (Garfield? I don't remember) loved squirrel soup. And we chuckled at this quote from President Arthur about "working from home".

If only he knew what life was like these days!

A walk down the road from the visitor's center gave us
a view

So classy with the sprinklers on and everything.

Washington Monument looking sassy.

This was a little island in the pond honoring
the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Vietnam Memorial was pretty sobering. But cool
to see the monument that we have read about in
a book called Maya Lin: Architect of Light and Lines.

That's a thick book of names that are on the wall.

Next stop: Abe.

This is an impressive monument!

His 2nd inaugural address carved into the wall to his left.

On his right is the Gettysburg Address
(in those shadows on the wall beyond the
pillars).

Washington from Lincoln. Also: these
are the steps where Martin Luther King Jr.
gave his famous I Have a Dream speech!
Pretty cool to stand there!

Korean War Memorial.

US Army and Korean Augmentation to 
the US Army soldiers who died in the war.

Onto Martin Luther King Jr. Monument, which was
new since the last time I was here in 2000.

And the clouds were just amazing to boot!

Across the tidal basin is the Jefferson Memorial.

We saw Marine One (or maybe it was Two) flying
over the Tidal Basin while we walked toward
Jefferson.

But first we stopped at the FDR Memorial.

These were quotes from FDR that were just in room
one of the memorial. The whole thing was quite expansive
and covered all four of his presidential terms. There was a lot
to see.

One of these things is not like the others.

Just keep walking. We got plenty of steps in that day!

And there's Jefferson himself.

From the Declaration of Independence.
(I can't help but sing along when I read them.)

On the back wall is an excerpt from a bill
for establishing religious freedom.

We walked back around the Tidal Basin
to Washington Monument. We tried to get
tickets to go inside and up to the top, but
you had to be there early to get a timed ticket
and they were all gone. So we looked at it
and then looked for a food truck to eat lunch
from.

We found DC's tastiest gyros and chicken sandwich
and burger and chicken strips in front of the Smithsonian
Museum of American History (which is behind me as I took this picture;
we're actually looking at the William Jefferson Clinton building,
which is the home of the EPA.)

Chow time!

Oh yeah!

We ended up being able to switch our tickets
to the Air and Space Museum museum to the
1:00 hour, so when we finished lunch at 1 ish, we
knew we had about a half hour to cruise through one
other museum on our way. We chose the Natural History
Museum, which was super cool, but we only saw basically
a sliver of the place! I thought this was cool: it's a section
of the earth taken from a crater in New Mexico showing the 
boundary between dinosaurs and extinction!

This was cool too - all the spots where people landed on
the moon marked with little flags.

Pretty rainbow of stones.

The Hope Diamond!

We didn't even exit the same door we entered. Here's
the view from the Mall as we booked it toward Air
and Space.

First stop in Air and Space: The Wright Brothers!
I think it said there were only like 4-5 of their bikes
known to exist!

This is the real Wright Flyer!

So stinkin' cool!

Looking up in the main part of the musuem
was pretty cool.

And now space!

Amazing!

This is one of the engines from the Saturn
Five Rocket.

These are parts from the Apollo 11 Engine that Jeff
Besos paid to have recovered from the bottom of
the ocean!

And this was maybe the coolest for me:
the sewing machine that made Neil Armstrong
and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins's space
suits!!

This is Armstrong's suit!

Sam loved the model of an X-wing
hanging outside the theatre entrance.

We sat here and looked at it for a while because our
legs were pooped!

Going underneath on the escalator on our
way out of the museum.

A few more things to check out in the early flight areas
before we leave: this is the 1909 Wright Flyer, the first
military plane!

We walked a few blocks to the nearest subway station
(a different one than we came in on) and hopped on a train
back to Chantilly.

Part of the reason to head back right then
is because we were SO tired and needed to sit for a
good long while. And part was we had found out that there
was ANOTHER Smithsonian Air and Space museum
just a few miles from our hotel and it had a shuttle!
It closed at 5:00 so we booked it back so we could see
a bit of that one, too.

First stop at the 2nd Air and Space
museum: the observation tower with awesome
360 views over that part of Virginia. Lovely.

I spy our car!

Then to the main attraction!

Oh wait, gotta check out the SR-71 on the way.

Oh, and the Bell-X1, which was the plane Chuck Yeager
flew in to break the sound barrier for the first time!

The back of the SR-71. (This was definitely cool, but
we actually can see one at Hill Aerospace Museum in
Ogden any old time.)

Ah! There it is!

The Space Shuttle Discovery!

It really was incredible to be up close to something
that was such a big part of our childhoods.

I just happened to check the
weather while we were wandering the
museum and I thought this picture
representing Chantilly was apt. Haha.

This thing was huge!

Completely amazing!

This was the special Airstream Trailer that the moon 
astronauts used as their quarantine based after they
returned from space.

Yum! Space food.

Bell X-1 again as we walked back into the main hangar.

Ha.

So. Many. Planes!

This was something cool that Ryan took a picture of
but we're not quite sure the story behind it. Haha.

So. Many. Planes!

A Concord! Gregg and Ryan's uncle actually flew on
these back and forth between Europe and the US back
in the day!

Sheesh! Long wings!

We went upstairs to get a different view.

The Concord from above. You can't even get
it all in one frame!

Some crazy balloon contraption.

Here's more info about that pic above.

I love the nose spiral.

This is the Enola Gay. Whoa. The first plane to drop
and atomic bomb in war!

They're really quite beautiful.

I loved these little figures of planes made by Steven Udvar-
Hazy as a child. (He is who this museum is named after!)

And back outside it was starting to rain. There's the tower
we had gone up in right at the beginning. We said goodbye
to Ryan so he could drive back to Davidson and get ready
for meetings with work the next morning.

It was time for dinner and we weren't really coming to
a consensus on where to eat. So we ended up pulling into
a Wendy's. But right in the same little complex as Wendy's was
a little spot called King Pollo. I felt like being brave, so I walked
over there and ended up ordering a giant Peruvian (and
Salvadorian) feast while the kids got their nuggets and jbc.

We took all the food back to the hotel and everyone
chowed down on Pollo a la Crema and Pollo Saltado
and pupusas and all the yummy sides: veggies and mashed
potatoes and green beans and rice and beans. Wow!

It was possibly the best meal of the trip.
(So far.) I'm glad I decided to be brave
and try something new!

One last pic of the day: the sunset from
the staircase window as I went down to the
car to grab something that was left behind.

 Phew! What an awesome day!