June 5 (Friday)
From Richland, Virginia it was time to head North toward Washington D.C. The day was primarily stopping at a few towns to check out stores and drive through the areas to get a feel for them. I had driven through this area in 2022 as part of another cross country trip but this time headed in a different direction with time to check out more of the area.
Walking the neighborhoods to visit shops and restaurants is the ideal time to look for what is often ‘unseen’ by most including stickers.
Not in any particular place I thought many of the street signs throughout Virginia were amusing.
Arriving in Washington D.C. was quite the change from the last time, just years prior. Seeing the increased presence of the National Guard around the city, and not just at monuments, was off-putting. The heat was unbearable and the 102 temperature felt even worse surrounded by concrete and asphalt.
June 6 (Saturday)
While many of us know of the National Air and Space Museum on the Washington mall from school field trips or traveling to D.C., there is a second, larger facility just outside in Virginia. The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is essentially an incredibly large hangar that houses over 200 air or spacecraft. Walking through the place is impressive between the scale and the history it houses. Among them is the Space Shuttle Discovery which saw 39 Earth-orbital missions and shuttled 184 men and women into space.
If you start your tour by heading left instead of straight to the stairs leading down, you can follow a walkway that puts you at eye-level with many historic planes.
One of the other parts of the exhibit that I found interesting are replicas of many iconic satellites that the world has put into space. They are to scale so you can get an understanding of just how big, or small, they are while performing a variety of functionality.
For those into military history you can see not only planes of old but their associated weaponry as well. Along with those are an incredibly wide variety of other pieces.
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