Into the District and Back Again

I just spent another long weekend out in DC visiting with Tim. It was a good 4-day weekend that was really busy. Man, I am tired. Here are the pictures.

I flew out on Thursday night on Midwest Airlines out of Milwaukee. That is a great airline. The DC route is signature service. This means large, leather seating and warm, cooked-on-board chocolate chip cookies. The best part is that it was still the cheapest ticket to fly.

It just so happens that the cherry blossoms were in bloom this weekend. They were really stunning. I spent Friday walking around the monuments especially on the Tidal Basin taking pictures and people watching. This was tiring and led to a nap on Teddy’s island where I had gone to pay homage to him.

Friday night I went to an exhibition game between the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles. I can’t say that I enjoy baseball, but it was fun. GO NATS!

On Saturday, we journeyed to Baltimore. There was some misadventure in getting to the rental car, but we did succeed. The first stop on the trip was the National Aquarium at Baltimore. It was a really good aquarium with a neat shark display, exhibit on Australia, and a dolphin show. I felt bad for the dolphins living is a rather small area, but they seemed happy. The other stop for the day was Fort McHenry. For those history-impaired, this was the fort being bombarded during the War of 1812 when the “Star Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key.

After a longer drive back, we dined and did a night tour of the monuments. Tim showed me how to get better night shots with my camera. I’ll have to make another trip with a tripod to make it really worthwhile.

Sunday we visited some museums and hung out with his kickball team. The new(ish) Museum of Native Americans was a little disappointing. It was more cultural than historical, and a lot of modern natives describing how they were trying to maintain their traditions. I was not that impressed. The post-kickball game festivities were entertaining with about 10 teams there all drinking and competing with each other in large games of flip cup. As far as I can tell, kickball is the excuse to have bar time like that.

We were home relatively early that night (11:30pm) since Tim had school in the morning. I spent my morning getting up early to head out to the Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport which is a 45-minute shuttle ride from the flagship building on the Mall. I had been once before, but there were new exhibits to see especially in the space hangar. The shuttle Enterprise is there surrounded by various rockets, missiles, early space capsules, satellites and space probes. The star of the show besides the shuttle was the Pathfinder rover replica and Pegasus rocket. It was worth the ride out there again.

I flew home Monday night after a two and a half hour flight delay due to weather. Sitting inside the terminal during the storm looked like being inside a Van de Graff generator. It was cool.

Visiting was nice, certainly not relaxing, but worth it.