A Day In The Life Of Me: Washington D.C.

Today is our first day in the grand capital of the United States of America. Alas, we neglected to make a lunch the previous evening which resulted in our departing late for the train. We decided just to drive to the subway station as opposed to taking the bus that stops at the campground since it’s only ten minutes away but takes twenty on the bus. Mum had already bought tickets for the train so we hopped right on. Mum had also printed off a scavenger hunt for the D.C area for us children to complete. Our destination for the day is the Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, which just so happens to be on the hunt. We stopped at another Smithsonian building, the Castle which is also the visitor’s centre, to orient ourselves and such things. When we walked the couple blocks down the National Mall to the museum, we looked around a couple of the exhibits before heading off for some lunch since it was already quite late. After that, Mum and I started a walking tour of the museum highlights. Isaac didn’t get to come with us since he was being an

argumentative jerk, so Dad took him to the cafeteria and set him up with work before coming to join the tour. We started out in the entry hall where they have some planes and satellites hanging from the roof. They’re doing repairs right now so one of the planes was on the ground and we could see inside the cockpit. In the hall they had Charles Lindburgh’s plane, the first plane to fly across the Atlantic, which didn’t have any front windows, just top and side, so the pilot almost flew over his landing spot. There was also the first plane to break the sound barrier, two early satellites, one Soviet made and the other American made, that could only monitor temperature and wind and such things just inside the atmosphere. The next room was dedicated to the Space Race of the ’60’s. They also had some of the mass-destruction missiles Hitler had used in

World War II. Most of the other things in the gallery were space craft, including part of the Apollo 13 and one of the space suits an astronaut had worn during the moon landing that’s still saturated with moon dust. There was also two space craft that had been created to uphold a treaty between Russia and the U.S.A and had the ability to attach so crew members could move between the two crafts. However, thanks to differing amounts of oxygen and nitrogen inside the U.S space craft and the Russian one, they had to install another addition, which a crew member would enter before going into the other craft so their oxygen levels could be regulated. The tour guide also told us about one of the crew members from the Apollo 13 who wore a second non-issued watch that not even NASA knew about at the time and he sold it for over a million dollars just because it had been on the moon. He’d only come out with the story a few years ago, which is pretty funny. The next gallery we saw was the Wright Brother gallery where they have a reproduction of their first engine powered plane. It was pretty interesting. They have some pieces left over from the original plane kept in glass containers. And the Wright Brothers, being smart, had one of the people on the beach take a picture of the plane in flight in order to have proof of their breakthrough so from then on, even though

other people came forward claiming to have flown first, the Wright Brothers were the ones documented in history because of that picture. The final gallery was about the pioneers of flight. Our tour guide didn’t have enough time to show us everything so he just told us about Amelia Earhart’s plane and the pilot herself. The plane in the museum was the one she had flown across the Atlantic as the first solo female pilot and then almost crashed before she made it to land. She didn’t make her final destination but instead managed to land in a farmer’s field in Ireland instead of France. Of course, they don’t have the one she tried to fly around the world since she and her navigator went down and the only trace of them ever found was a bottle of freckle cream Amelia might have used to cover her freckles. After the tour was over I did a report on the red plane for my homework and then went off to finish my scavenger hunt. I had to find a moon rock, the monkey that went to space, the first plane to fly over the Atlantic and the Wright Brother’s 1903 plane. I’d already found a couple of them but it took a surprisingly long time to find the monkey so by the time I finished, it was time to go watch the IMAX movie we had paid for. The show was about D-Day and the events leading up to it, a lot of which I hadn’t known before. Apparently, the Allies had set up an elaborate plan in which they convinced the German’s they were going to attack North of Normandy, which is where the German troupes assembled their tanks and men, although Normandy was still very well guarded. We won though, in the end. After the movie we headed back to the camp for Kizmet and Isaac and I did some work while Mum and Dad went to the store. Peace out m8s.

#camping #washingtondc #maryland