Day: 24
Date: 25/4 -26/4
City: Washington, District Columbia
Miles ridden: 0
Cumulative miles: 757
The plan today was to go to the Smithsonian, Val felt a bit unwell and stayed home. So Wombat, Sigrid and I had a 20 minute walk to the train station. The area was nice, the houses were well looked after, so nothing really justified the dark picture drawn by the lady at the front desk yesterday evening. I also noticed that there was no graffiti on the train station or in the train. It  all looked very new and clean.

The train ride didn’t take long at all, only about 20 minutes. When we arrived in Washington, we made our way to the Smithsonian and passed some impressive buildings. I’m sure we could have easily spent another week here without getting bored. There are American Archives, the International Spy Museum, 19 different Smithsonian museums…… We had to cherry pick. We picked the ‘National Air and Space museum’ and the ‘National Museum of the American Indian’ for our 2 day visit. When we arrived at the Smithsonian, we were surprised to find that the entry was free. We were stunned when we looked at the entrance hall; there were replicas and original sof different space modules and airplanes. It took some time before we could move on to the next area.

Below are the Gemini 4 and Apollo 11 command module.

A model of the Viking Lander

and some exhibition about the entire American Space race/program, the beginning of flying, a whole section with physics experiments that explained why airplanes fly, Space shuttle project …., in fact so much that we only got to see the first half of it the first day! Around 17:00 we were asked to leave. It was still daylight so we had a look at the Washington Monument (closed due to earthquake damage) and the ‘White House’.

The Diddles and us in front of the White House.

The day was gone in no time. After a nice meal in an Irish pub (and some Guinness) we hopped back onto the train and walked from the train station to the hotel.

The next day, the four of us got on the train to Washington to look at the 2^nd half of the Smithsonian and to spend the rest of the day in the ‘Nation6al Museum of the American Indian’.

One of the interesting parts was to walk through the Skylab workshop to see how the Astronauts worked and lived in there.

There was as well an exhibition about the history of aircraft carriers, which took much longer to go through than we thought. After rushing through the last sections of the Smithsonian we went to the’ National Museum of the American Indian’ which was not far away. The surroundings and the building were impressive

As usual we did not have enough time to see it all, but it gave us a good overview and we earmarked Washington for another visit 😀