Day one in Washington DC, where it’s hot & kind of muggy.
Picture-heavy, so I’ve put in a “read more”
My plan for the morning was to go and get breakfast from a place I’d spotted on the way to the hotel. Unfortunately, I hadn’t spotted the “we’re closed” sign taped to the doors, so that didn’t happen.
As I was already out, I went for a walk towards the Capitol to see how close you can get; Pretty close, as it turns out.
On the way there I ended up chatting to an older guy who was looking for the visitor centre; I found it by accident, but he’d wandered off towards the other end of the building by then, so I couldn’t point it out. It’s basically underneath me in this picture, and the entrance is behind me & down.
Hotel breakfast happened, along with some amusing conversation from the next table when they discovered that they couldn’t buy alcoholic drinks until 11am. Not sure whether that’s a Washington thing or a hotel thing, but it’s apparently a thing.
I had a ticket for the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, but did pause on the walk there to get some no doubt very clichéd pictures of the Washington Monument.
It took about 4 hours to go through everything I was interested in, which was most things, and that’s with maybe half the museum closed. Some highlights;
- Apollo 11 command module
- Gene Cernan’s moon boots, which left the last set of prints on the surface
- Wright Flyer from 1903. There was a whole section on how & why they succeeded, and this could best be summed up as “learning from what others have tried, incremental testing, and experiments when things didn’t make sense”
- Combustion chamber from a Saturn 5
- Goddard’s very battered test rocket
I asked various friends for suggestions of Strange British Snacks to take to the US. This is the one I’m the most worried about.
