I suppose I start late yesterday. My cousin Tom from Ohio has come to join us and he arrived in the evening. He did an MBA at Georgetown University so knows the Washington DC area well.
He suggested we go to Alexandria for dinner and what a great place.
We had dinner at a fish restaurant on Kings Street called The Wharf. And we had some delicious meals. Kings Street (and Alexandria in general) has a good collection of restaurants, shops and bars. And when we left the restaurant about 10.30pm the area was buzzing. (A great place for Street Pastors?)
Cousin Tom is an aeronautical engineer, so when Tom G and I suggested we visit the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia (a very large museum devoted entirely to planes and rockets) Tom B’s face lit up.
Once again this was a serious day for the boys. But Anne bravely stuck it out. The highlight for me was seeing the Space Shuttle Discovery. Though there are many interesting exhibits including an SR 71 Blackbird spy plane, and F14 Tomcat (seen Top Gun – that’s the kind of plane Tom Cruise “flies”). I could go on but most of you are already glazing over.
Tom B was able to give us some very interesting personal stories about some of the planes in the collection. But perhaps the most fascinating was that one of his lecturers at university had been a student of Werner Von Braun in World War 2 Germany. (Von Braun joined NASA after the war in developing the Apollo rockets.) Tom saw a picture of his professor with Von Braun.
Tom B lent us a spare Garmin Sat Nav he had. (He’d decided to upgrade yesterday.) And that was so helpful getting into DC. So we found our hotel without too much difficulty and it is in a great spot. About 25 minutes’ walk from the White House.
We took a stroll around the area and ended up just off DuPont Circle which is quite a “hip” area apparently. We found a great little diner for dinner.
First impressions – we like DC a lot.
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