Air and Space Museum

Space Shuttle Discovery

I’ve been waiting to go out to the new addition to the Air and Space Museum, out at Dulles Airport. Here they displayed a lot of spacecraft and planes that are just too big for the downtown museum. As you walk in the first plane that catches your eye is an SR-71 spy plane, designed to fly higher than any missile can reach. Each area of the museum had an aviation theme: Pre-1920, business, stunt, commercial, World War II, Korean, Cold War, vertical flight. Some of my favorites included the Langley Aerodrome which tried to fly like a bird, the Supersonic Concorde, the Boeing 707 (my first airplane flight from Chicago to Paris was on a 707), the gleaming metal of the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, the Virgin Atlantic Global Flier, which flew non-stop around the world, the Enola Gay B-29, which dropped the bomb on Japan, and finally the space hangar with the Discovery shuttle  

and lots of satellites, rockets, and missiles.

SR-71

In the afternoon, we visited Arlington National Cemetery. It still is in the 90s, so we walked the minimum: up to the Kennedys’ grave sites (John, Jackie, Robert, Ted, and Joseph), then to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We arrived at 3:58 PM, just in time for the changing of the guard. We were pretty walked out and hot by the end of the day.

Arlington National Cemetery