2009 11 Jun

Day 1 in DC

Storms last night in the DC area made for a warm and very muggy day. But, that didn’t bother us any because we were mostly inside nice cool buildings. The day started with a pretty puny continental breakfast, but hey, it was free. My wife made herself a waffle and I had a toasted bagle with plenty of cream cheese to make sure I met my daily allowance of cholesterol. Actually, I do try to watch what I eat most of the time, but I’m on vacation – and I drank 2 glasses of orange juice, so that was healthy.

Washington Monument

The hotel runs a shuttle to a nearby metro station every 30 minutes or so and we hopped aboard to begin our day. If you have never been to the DC area, they have a public transit system known as the MetroRail. If you visit the DC area, this is the way to go. You don’t have to worry about renting a car, or paying high fares for taxi rides. For about a buck 75, you can go almost anywhere. Most places you want to visit are close to the National Mall, so you will also walk… a lot.

We took the train to the Smithsonian station, which was good because that’s where we wanted to go. We started off at the Smithsonian Castle. This is not only the visitor center for the Smithsonian complex, but they also have artificacts from the various museums and from James Smithson as well. In fact, his crypt is located in an anteroom as you walk inside the door.

We made our next stop the Air and Space Museum. This is a must-see for anyone visiting as it has many exhibits sure to pique the interest of almost everyone. My wife was intrigued by the actual aircraft the Wright Brothers first flew. The cloth over the wings had been replaced, but the airframe was original. Artifacts from the beginnings of the space program are prominently displayed in several areas of the museum. It is fascinating to see how three men can fit inside such a small area that the space capsule provides. One certainly could not be claustrophobic and be an astronaut.

Control Panel

Space suits, moon suits and flight suits are on display. It’s neat to see the differences between US and Soviet suits and tools during the space race. It makes you appreciate their bravery when you see how fragile their craft were. Also, when you remember that your pocket calculator has more computing power than they had aboard their capsule and they still managed to land on the moon and return safely, you appreciate their bravery that much more.

A very fascinating exhibit shows how satellites do things from spying on weather to spying on your enemies to connecting the world with television and telephone. We learned facts about the Hubble telescope and even saw a spare mirror for the telescope.

In fact, there is an exhibit showing the evolution of stargazing tools from the quadrant to the reflective telescope. We learned how Galileo deduced that the earth actually orbited the sun and not the other way around.

I particularly enjoyed the exhibit on computers in both air and space flight. I saw the inside of a Cray-1 supercomputer and learned that it was designed in a circular shape to cut down on the length of the wires connecting the busses. No wire is over two feet in length. This was designed that way to help the computer run faster.

Cray-1 Super Computer

There are plenty of hands-on exhibits for kids. They can learn about Bernoulli and how air flow affects objects such as aircraft wings. They learn why the wings are shaped the way they are, what flaps are and what they do, how the control surfaces such as flaps, elevator, ailerons, and rudder work together to keep a plane in stable, controlled flight. There are also times when they bring out mobile stations and have a fun lesson with the young ones.

We spent all day in that one museum, so we are going to have to budget our time to make the most out of the four remaining days we have here. After leaving the museum, we walked to the Washington Monument and took some pictures there. We plan to get their early one day and take advantage of the free tickets to tour the monument.

We even saw the original model of the Star Ship Enterprise from the original Star Trek show. This was the model they actually used when showing the outside of the ship. The exhibit was complete with the original stand that still had some of the blue masking paint on it to make it look like the ship was in space.